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| Kohler K4484 Flushmate Tank |
Many years ago, when I was a young man attending a computer programming seminar, my mind was poisoned by a rare and independent thinker.
"Always use the lowest level of technology which solves the problem," I was told, in that rare of rarest of moments. "So, if a flat text file solves the problem as well as anything else...use that. If a CSV file solves the problem, use that in preference to an XML file. If an XML file solves the problem, use that in preference to a database management system. If a relational database system solves the problem, use that in preference to an object oriented database system. If an object oriented database solves the problem, use that in preference to an artificially intelligent system."
I've pretty much stuck to that idea, while it has most often seemed the world was whirling around me, taking the exact opposite course in every arena. People in general seemed more of the opinion we
must use the highest level of technology available to solve
every problem, and getting
the jump on others by using the next level up if even it's barely out of
alpha testing.
At least, people who are marketeers, enthusiasts, managers, executives, and best friends. Grunt front end programmers like me would pretty much sigh in unison at the unveiling of the latest and greatest
Next Generation Technology we'd have to find some way to get work done by working around, once again. As long as I can remember, "beta" testing is done by the early adopting customers, and even the not-so-early adopting customers. And for many computing technologies, this means front line programmers and administrators--we were constantly pushed into new things just because it's there and we need to be on top of it. And so, we have computer operating systems like Windows which may take days to update themselves--if they can do so at all--because they rely on
fuzzy logic to handle all the situations they may encounter, and planes that don't fly because computer programs were supposed to
hide their aerodynamic instabilities. Operating systems that don't operate, planes that don't fly, and toilets that don't flush.
I had this very much in mind when Mr Chambliss himself, of the
A rated Chambliss Plumbing Company of Bulverde Texas shot down my choice of toilet (a second Champion 4) in preference to his choice, while we were discussing my bathroom renovation plans (a discussion I felt privileged to be having, in late 2015).
"I'm doing Flushmate in all my new installs now. The City will soon be requiring 1.0g per flush in all new installs real soon, and this is by far the best way to go. This gives you the most flushing power available, even more than than the old water wasters. You'll be ahead of the curve of water saving, and get a nice rebate for it also. So you save money all around. It fits right in the Kohler tank, and looks just like an ordinary toilet."
This brought back memories of when the first water saving toilets, rated at 1.6 gallons, were introduced. Those early toilets simply didn't flush well. City Officials had been sold on the idea mainly by "progressive" (and profit seeking) plumbing companies, and plumbers themselves, it had seemed to me. Some environmentalists were pushing it also, but since City Officials rarely listened to them, it must have been the business interests that sold them on the idea, I have always reasoned.
Then, it was at least 5 years before there were ANY good flushing toilets again, and at least a decade before good flushing 1.6 gallon toilets were the new normal. That had barely started to be the case when the standard was changed once more to 1.28 gallons. It's like they just wanted us to have dysfunctional toilets. It's now pretty obvious why plumbers and plumbing companies always badger city officials into demanding the latest barely-out-of-alpha water saving technologies be adopted. It makes them more money in the long run, with endless service calls and early replacements. I remember when toilets were rarely, if ever, replaced. My cousin still had the original 1915 toilet in his 1915 Craftsman house as late as 1995, when he sold it (the house--after being required to update the toilet--I wonder if THAT one is still there).
I remember my first finally decent working 1.6 gallon toilet--very well. Because I still have it (and in fact it's the only working toilet on my premises right now). It is the endlessly maligned (by professional plumbers) American Standard Champion 4. I nevertheless insisted in 2009 that plumbers install this model (and they were griping all the way and charged me pretty penny--far more than it would have cost to install
their favorite toilet). I will concede it has in fact needed more service over the years than it should have, and it didn't help that professional plumbers never seem to have the right parts for it either (oh, those are not standard, they will say, you'll have to wait 2 weeks for us to get it from the company, they're located in Mexico now). But after 11 years, it still basically works, and still has the nice strong flush it always had. A nice strong flush that doesn't make your concrete floor shake, bang the pipes, squirt water on your pants, and startle the cat into running to the other side of the house.
And then, there was the Flushmate. I hated it from the first day. It did all those bad things, and more.
Ok, I have always liked, though I didn't necessarily need, the strong flush. I personally didn't really need that so much. I poop multiple times a day, so never bricks.
I got the "flushes a bucket of golf balls" Champion 4 for the guest bathroom for an important reason. I have friends who shit cinderblocks, thankfully toward the end of my monthly parties, almost as if they'd been saving it up all month. These cinderblocks had a nasty tendency to clog the toilets the builder installed in my house in 1983. After installing the Champion 4, I never had that toilet clogging problem again. Except that on two occasions, at the end of the party, the toilet per se hadn't clogged, but now the drain pipe did, which was even worse. But that was related to other issues, such as roots, that made their way into my drain pipes, not really the toilet's fault.
People seeing the narrow Champion 4 tank never believe me when I say it flushes very well. "Don't worry about the toilet paper," I tell my friend who doesn't like to put toilet paper in the toilet bowl. "It flushes a bucket of golf balls." Somehow this never convinces people, but they do use the toilet anyway, if they can't wait to get home, sometimes leaving it for me to do the actual flush because they still don't trust toilets.
Most important of all might well be that if something
does fail to operate, one particular time, for whatever reason (possibly because others have not learned to press the lever down all the way quickly) it's always possible to fix at least this time by taking off the lid, pushing down the flapper, or some similar operation.
But from the very beginning, the Flushmate revealed itself as one angry monster. Angry, Capricious, and Inscrutable.
The first problem I noticed was the strong knock on the pipes, every time I flushed. The tank would refill with a mysteriously varying combination of bubbling and gurgling sounds, then
bang when it was all done, from some pipe behind the walls. I wondered how much of that my pipes could take.
I can't remember when I first mentioned that to the plumber. It was not on the first service call, I had other more pressing issues that first time, like the problem that it would never stop trying to fill up, which I'll describe later. I think I mentioned it on the second service call, which was again for something else--and perhaps the same thing as the first call. But that first time I did mention it, my concern about the pipe, which I thought would have been obviously wrong to any plumber, was quickly dismissed as normal.
Finally, on the third service call, after two years of living with a toilet that strongly rattled my plumbing after every flush, I complained loudly and clearly enough to the plumber (and they sent Chambliss' astute son that time, so I was lucky) that he was finally determined, and did, fix it.
That was a scene unto itself. Chambliss' son said "Well, I could install a damper. We sometimes do that with other problems like this. But the Sloan factory insists it is never needed. So we really want to find out what the problem is, if you don't mind." And thus began a pair of days where my bathroom became the Sloan Flushmate Beta Testing Laboratory. After two days of testing everything else, with the plumber constantly calling Sloan on his cell phone, the damper was installed, contrary to Sloan's continuing insistence that it wasn't needed, and the problem was finally solved (and that one particular problem has not returned, the pipe banging, has never returned).
But that was the last time I called Chambliss, for another reason.
It was time also that I had gotten a new receptionist, who told me "We service Bulverde, Timberlake, and Alamo Heights. You do not appear to be in our service area."
"But I had Chambliss install this very flushmate toilet that's not working, and also my bathtub, and they've been doing all my plumbing for the last 8 years!" I protested.
"OK, I'll ask Mr Chambliss."
It was about then that I decided that if they couldn't fix the problem this time, I'd try to find another
A list plumber to do all my plumbing immediately, and have them install a new toilet for starters. I certainly wouldn't have Chambliss do any major installation jobs, as may be required in future for my next water heater. What if they really did stop servicing what they had sold me? Probably no one else would want to service the far out stuff they had installed either.
(Chambliss was on the leading edge of certain things, like Flushmate water saving toilets, and PEX tubing which I had never even imagined before. Things that a plumber would think of, but not so much a consumer. Chambliss was completely dismissive of features I had some previous interest in myself, such as automatic or light operated faucets and toilets. "You don't want that kind of stuff," he said. "I won't install it. It's unreliable.")
But Chambliss' son DID fix the problem this time, about 2 years after the Flushmate Kohler toilet had been installed, and probably the second time I brought the issue up to a Chambliss plumber on the premises.
And he showed me something else too.
"You are going to love this. See this little thing," he said, holding the duckbill valve. "This is the part that sometimes needs replacing. It's a lot easier and cheaper to replace than the usual stuff toilets use," he said.
I was having trouble remembering exactly what that part was, but in fact I figured it out a couple years later, when the toilet failed again, and I decided I would try to fix the problem myself rather than deal with cross examination by the Chambliss receptionist and possible rejection by The Big Guy himself. If it weren't for that, I would have been happy to call Chambliss again, the actual plumbers always seemed ok, and Chambliss himself being no more cranky than the usual cranky plumber I respect.
But the practical problem is that sometimes the Flushmate toilet flushes ok one time, but then never "finishes" filling the "tank" afterwards. It keeps running and running. If you try to flush while it's still running-and-running like his, you won't get anything. In that regards, it's not like the old fashioned kind that keeps running and running while having partly filled the tank--for those toilets you can still get some flush. But if the Flushmate never stops running, you get zero flush. There may be water in the tank, but it hasn't consolidated and formed a space for air pressure to build up, and without air pressure, the tank won't flush. You don't see the water running out anywhere, but it must be slowly leaking across the bowl of the toilet. Meanwhile you hear a bubbling and gurgling, which is only slightly different from the bubbling and gurgling sounds you normally hear, and one would always try, but often unsuccessfully, to hear whether it was one or the other. Is it "filling up" or not, would always be the question, and you might wait in the bathroom an extra 30 seconds to guess better whether it was one or the other, with far worse than chance success it seemed.
Most often, whenever the endlessly running condition occurred, I could usually fix it with enough fiddling, usually just pushing the toilet handle once or a few times, in one of several different patterns.
Sometimes, I'd go back to the toilet and press the handle all the way down (during which time the gurgling sound would change to a distinct bubbling sound for a few seconds then stop) and then let go quickly, and that would fix the problem. Other times, I'd simply lower and raise the handle slowly. In the end, it wasn't clear which sort of handle maneuver was really the best, so I'd sometimes try them all until I found something that worked again. Most of the time, something like this would stop the endless running, which happened every once and awhile. And I'd forget about it, until the next week or so or less when it happened again, until such measures failed to work at all.
I tried to find the optimal way to flush the flush handle in the first place so I wouldn't need to go back. I kept on with these "experiments," and I still can't tell you whether you're more likely to get a successful flush by pushing the handle all the way down and letting up quickly, or pressing only half the way down and letting up slowly, or any of a hundred or so variations. Sometimes it fills the tank correctly, and sometimes it doesn't, is the best conclusion I have been able to reach, after 5 years of frustration.
This kind of fiddling would usually work. But sometimes I'd reach the point where no amount of handle re-maneuvering would fix the problem. Then, the next stage of experimentation, which I've also been down many times, involves fine adjustment of the water supply valve. I'd turn the quarter turn value down, then up, then at various levels in between. As you do this, the sound of the water supply and the tank gurgling changes. Right from the beginning it "sounds" promising, like a little change of the supply level flow has nudged it back into normal operation. But usually not, usually when it reaches this point you may have to spend a half hour of handle shaking and water supply re-adjusting before the tank "fills up" and stops running. And if after a half hour or so of doing this, you still haven't fixed the problem, then it's time to call Chambliss, or look online for that magic part I was once shown.
If I adjusted the supply way down, I could nearly eliminate the banging. But then immediately, the other problem occurred. I sometimes tried to finesse exactly the point that would give me minimum banging, and yet get past this next problem. But just as often, and always after a service call, the supply was turned fully back on again, for awhile anyway. Finally, after the banging was fixed completely, I simply left the supply turned all the way up all the time. Until I was close to giving up on everything else, as I shall describe. I describe these details for technical accuracy, for those who might complain that "I brought this all on myself, because of the banging, by keeping the supply level too low." But that was not usually the case. It was turned all the way up far more often than otherwise, and my water pressure has generally been on the high side also, and yet I still had this never filling problem. But also they did seem to be somehow in mysterious opposition, like pushing and pulling, which is how you begin to think about things whose effects you can only hear, without really having any clue as to what is going on. One could say, the most maddening things about many things, and especially technological things, is their lack of transparency.
With other toilets, you can see the inner workings fairly clearly, and to get the toilet to work One More Time isn't usually a problem. You can push down the flapper or whatever the issue is. That doesn't solve the problem permanently, it may come back a few days later, if not the very next flush. If it starts to come back too frequently, then you can examine all the inner workings carefully, possibly bend something or another so it goes all the way through, or move some chain fastener a few notches, and then it's back to normal for another few months, and so on. When all that fails, you can go to Home Depot and get some kind of replacement part that will fix the problem for perhaps another year or two without much intervention, and then it's back to the fiddling and jiggling all over again.
The Flushmate does not provide you with the opportunity to do that sort of inside fiddling. You are stuck with jiggling the handle, readjusting the water supply value, and things like that, from the outside, with not a clue as to what is going on inside, or a realistic chance of improving it by deduction. What is going on inside is clearly
rocket science that the manufacturer doesn't even try to explain to us.
On top of that, it's absolutely and positively scary. You know there is dangerous pressure inside that thing, and it's covered with warning labels and looks like a bomb. You surely don't want to mess with any of the adjustments the plumber made, such as the green colored actuator (which warns you about the minimum required clearance).
Even an ordinary flush, when it works, is enough to shake my concrete slab floor and send my cat off to the other side of the house as if there had been a bolt of lightning. Consumer Reports warns that people don't like the loud noise (I've always thought it made my house sound like a dormatory and broadcast the fact of my toilet flushing to all my household guests) and that there can be explosions: one person had $700,000 in damages including personal injuries from the exploding porcelain tank.
So after I became afraid of being rejected by Mr Chambliss in my attempt to get one more service call (I never had any complaints about their service call pricing and wouldn't be afraid of that, as such) I began trying to find out more about the magic part that would fix the Flushmate.
That was when I finally learned--not just going in one ear and out the other--about the Duckbill Valve. The toilet had once again gotten into the endless-running situation, with no amount of jiggling anything able to stop it. So I looked online, asking Google a few questions, and got the answer.
In a few days, I had the Duckbill valve in hand, and taking a few chances (it seemed I might break the plastic piece it attaches to trying to remove the old Duckbill valve) I got it replaced, and wonderfully, the toilet worked perfectly again, perhaps more perfectly than I had remembered it ever working before. Now it didn't seem to be so critical how deeply or how long I held the flush lever down, it simply worked every time. "I'm a genius," I said to myself.
That feeling lasted exactly 3 months, and then it was back to the old handle jiggling.
Then I took the new-ish Duckbill valve out, rinsed it off in water, and the toiled worked fine for another week. Now, no more rinsing of the Duckbill valve seems to help, and I can't find the second one I ordered, and it just seems very wrong I should need to be replacing it every 3 months, or perhaps less and less.
I went back online, and now it seems that in the official instructions there are a complicated other set of things to look at. "Check the supply screen" it says in one list. But it doesn't happen to tell me where the plumber installed the supply screen, so I checked all the places and screens I could find, and none are even close to being blocked, and blowing air and/or water through them didn't seem to help either.
So this is now the point at which, after 5 years, I have decided, finally decided once and for all, to replacement this incredibly annoying and frustrating and incomprehensible toilet with something I hope will be less so. And there are other reasons too.
Way back in 2015, Chambliss had questioned my choice of a "Comfort Height" toilet.
But actually, I had questioned it first. I told him "The height of the Champion 4 with Comfort Height is exactly correct," I incorrectly said then. "But the Kohler [which he wanted to sell me] is at least an inch higher, probably too high. Can you sell me another toilet with the 16.5 inch height of the American Standard?"
That was when Chambliss replied, "Why do you need a 'Comfort Height' toilet anyway?" he said nearly rolling his eyes. Does anyone in your house have trouble standing up from a standard toilet?"
I did not agree that I had trouble standing up. I just thought the 16.5 inch height was nicer, but Kohler had taken it too far with 17.5 inches.
I was already beginning to understand what I understand now. That low toilets are better for pooping. Now I know that even the low low 15 inch high "Standard" American toilets may be too high, physiologically. The more we get down to poop, the easier it is, because stooping down opens up the colon somehow. Other countries have used lower toilets for a long time, even opening at floor level, for this reason.
But in spite of Chambliss' criticism, I went ahead with the taller 17.5 inch Kohler toilet anyway. I still thought taller was nicer. That was a mistake, and it was entirely my mistake, since he strongly suggested otherwise. I have indeed suffered more from constipation while using this toilet. If I really needed to, I could use the 16.5 inch toilet I have in the guest bathroom, but I like using the one in my own bathroom somehow and almost always do.
It got even worse quickly. It turned out, Kohler had already tried to make their tall toilet slightly lower by using a very very thin toilet seat. This toilet seat has a combination of complex curves it it, and before too long I felt sores on my inner leg because of it.
Looking at the Kohler seat, it's not obvious how it could hurt you. There are no sharp edges. But while I was sitting down, it was easy to feel the problem. The lack of convexity in the middle of the toilet seat caused the skin of my legs to wrap underneath the bottom of the seat. That "edge" isn't sharp at all, but the fact that the curve changes so quickly, causes the skin to slightly wrap around it, slightly pinching it in reverse, squeezed out by my own weight.
It was immediately clear to me the American Standard seat on my Champion 4 was more comfortable. It was fully convex on top and slightly higher, and did not pinch the inside of my legs.
The solution was to replace the Kohler seat with an American Standard seat. It was helpful that the color that Kohler calls "Almond" is exactly, precisely, the same as the color American Standard calls "Bone." The American Standard seat sits and works perfectly atop the Kohler. (Perhaps even more perfectly than on the Champion 4 itself.) But it also raises the already too high height even a little more.
So now, I'm getting an American Standard Cadet Series (one of the only toilets made by American Standard the famous Toto-pushing online plumber Terry Love has ever recommended) in standard height with elongated bowl.
So it's back to a regular toilet mechanism, and the "standard" height.
Why not a Kohler or (gasp) Toto? I have reasons.
Kohler, strangely enough, doesn't make a toilet with 10 inch rough in and standard height. If you want standard height, in a Kohler toilet, you have to get 12 inch rough in or greater. It would seem that the Kohler trap and raceway are simply too big to be squeezed in otherwise when the toilet is both low and thin. Think
big American.
Toto toilets tend to use plastic tubing inside. The trap and raceway are not all porcelain. This way, Toto can stock their toilets in multiple varieties worldwide without having to stock 10, 12, and 14 inch rough ins for each variety. I can see this makes sense from an
international distribution point of view. But I really like the idea of having my toilet be "all porcelain" and not have plastic parts hidden underneath the porcelain that could break or leak. People have complained about the sound of dripping from within this plastic tube being audible, whereas it wouldn't be through solid porcelain.
Also Toto also does a lot of experimentation with Rocket Science mechanisms not unlike the Flushmate. Toto toilets tend to have bottom grooves and openings in the bowl that make it difficult or impossible to use a standard plunger, and then I'd also feel afraid of using a snake because of the internal plastic pipe.
Only American Standard sticks with the simplest of mechanisms, with the great innovation making the Champion 4 (and the later and much better designed Cadet) being a 3 inch valve, replacing the original 2 inch one that had been standard in US toilets since forever.
NOT rocket science. A slightly larger valve. Terry Love likes to remind people that Toto did it first.
Now, some will say that all energy efficient toilets are the beneficiaries of some sophisticated finite element analysis and other modeling, to get the flow perfected. Well it's fine if a very sophisticated process produces a perfected, simple, and reliable product, but any lack of reliability should be ameliorated by transparency and flexibility.
Rocket Science is what
only Rocket Scientists
understand pretend to understand.
But what about this water usage thing? I'm not saying that toilets shouldn't be
well designed to be more water efficient. There is nothing, in principle, wrong with that. There are good ways to go about that, and not so good ways.
Some might say, we need to push the envelope. We need to force manufacturers to make more water saving products, as opposed to focusing on customer dreams and fantasies.
Speaking of which, it seemed quite curious to me that while showerheads were being restricted more and more (which hasn't actually been a problem, if you have something like Delta's H2OKinetic showerheads...an example of high technology properly applied during the design phase), at the very same time, fancy home websites and magazines were pushing fantasies like waterfall showers, lined with multiple special high flow heads, to give you that special feeling. So it seems that if you are rich enough, water saving doesn't matter, you can have personal waterfalls, lakes, and water parks, whatever. For the rest of us, it's 2.0 gallons per minute, or less.
But no such ambiguity in toilets. Even the fancy fully automated toilets that do everything except putting your pants back on are designed to have low flush volume, whatever the current standard is.
How important would it be, that we should sacrifice a little household bliss to help the water saving project move forwards?
By virtually everything you read, everywhere, it is
extremely important. Toilets are the
number one use of water inside the home.
Therefore, ,you might argue, even if we have to replace our toilets every few years, and put up with a few idiosyncracies, it's all effort directed to the greater good.
But, how much, I still wonder. These things are never put in the fullest context.
Rather than just looking at toilets in regards to water use inside a home, why not look at toilets in relation to all water used in human society, because if we want to "reduce human-caused water use," that is the fullest context.
You will
not find these two kinds of information on the same page probably anywhere but here.
My back-of-the envelope calculation is that toilets represent about 1% of total human water use.
First of all, look at the per-person water use, then scale up by the number of people. A "household" is said to use 33 gallons per day via toilet. That would mean just over 8 gallons per person, or about 5 flushes of a 1.6g/flush toilet.
So for 328 million people in the USA, that would be 2.6 billion gallons.
Total water use in the USA, including industry, agriculture, and residential is 322 billion gallons per day.
That means, toilet flushing accounts for somewhat less than 1% of total water use.
If we did all our stuff into the ground or rivers like our ancestors, but everything else was the same, we would be using 99% as much water as we do now even continuing flush our army of toilets of widely varying efficiencies.
I have always felt that focussing on toilets, or even personal use of water generally, is to distraction from larger issues, like the 99% of water we don't use flushing toilets. Why are we not to focus on the 99% instead? Because a lot of it is bound up with p-r-o-f-i-t-s which might be lower rather than higher if the focus were on them rather than household personal needs. By putting people and their toilets first in the spotlight, whatever resistance to water saving there may be, or insufficiencies, can be conveniently be blamed on people and not p-r-o-f-i-t-s, which don't even get looked at very closely and may even increase with the selling of more toilets.
There's another thing here, also. While we do not water use increasing (and under current trajectories, it will anyway due to increasing population), water use as such is not as environmentally destructive as fossil fuel use.
We could (and would have to) continue using some water even in a fully sustainable society, if we ever get there. Meanwhile, certain other things, like using fossil fuels, would have to end and their aftereffects even reversed.
Water use is NOT the same kind of issue as fossil fuel use. In fact, water is mostly, and within limits, a fully renewable resource itself. Water rains down from the sky and flows in rivers. As long as we don't use
too much and deplete aquifers and streams, we are OK continuing to use it.
So it's not even a matter of distracting us from the 99% of water not used in flushing toilets, it's a matter of distracting us from far more important long term environmental threats caused by continuing to use
any fossil fuels (any further fossil fuel usage contributes to atmospheric and oceanic carbonization), as well as the ultimate need to reduce the human population growth rate to zero or less than zero. Reducing the human population growth rate to zero or less than zero would greatly reduce the need to improve water saving technologies. Ultimately, it's the only way that a sustainable society can be maintained anyway. But we don't talk about that much, and in mainstream media and elsewhere, such concerns are considered far out totalitarianism. What is talked about, is the need to keep improving the efficiency of toilets.
Update: The American Standard Cadet Pro with elongated bowl is the best toilet I've ever had. The 1.2 gallon flush mechanism feels great, sounds great, and works perfectly. The "standard" lower height helps bowel elimination. I'm so glad I got the old toilet replaced. One small downside: the 2.5 inch lower bowl, even though roughly the same size as the Kohler Comfort Height, requires more careful urination when standing.
