Saving Toilet Water for Dummies

Types of toilet valves

We all want to save money – or, to be more accurate, we all want to have more money so we can spend it, too (that's one of the reasons so many people voted for Donald Trump). So if you wander around the internet for a while with our research staffers, you're going to find a lot of money-saving ideas. Many are get-rich-quick schemes where the only person who gets rich is the guy who sells it to you, but some are real. Some, however, are the product of poor thought processes, like those of Victoria Ries. She's the person responsible for "How to Use Less Water in a Toilet" for the folks at eHow.com, who've since moved this to HomeSteady.com (and eventually deleted it¹).

Ries, at the time a college student (in psychology), apparently was in a "crunchy-granola" mood when she wrote her piece, several times suggesting that her readers to use rainwater to save water. Clearly, Victoria is unfamiliar with changes in toilet design since the 1980s, since she devoted almost her entire article to the old "milk jug full of water in the tank" method. According to Ries, you should

"Flush the toilet lever to empty the tank. While the toilet tank is empty, place full plastic half-gallon jug [sic] in the bottom of the tank out of the way of the functioning internal works of the toilet. To save fresh water, harvest rainwater from a downspout and flush the toilet with a half bucket of rainwater."

We liked that "functioning internal works" bull, both for its redundancy and for the manner in which Ries didn't have to explain what those "works" might be. We did find the appended exhortation to flush with "a half bucket of rainwater" a bit confusing, since the milk jug method and the bucket flush have zero to do with each other, not to mention that the next flush after a bucket flush would be rather... wimpy. Victoria does a little math to explain that a family of four could, conceivably, save "360 gallons per month equalling [sic] about seven 55-gallon barrels" with this method. By our calculation, that would require 720 flushes per month or 24 per day... wow: someone sure pees a lot!

Of course, most plumbers can tell you that reducing the volume of the flush is going to make most solid-waste trips to the potty "two-flushers," which pretty much negates this method: the second flush with a conventional, 3-gallon per flush, toilet would offset the savings of five flushes. Oops.

Ries also fails to mention 1) that the milk jug method will not work in a low-flow (1.5 gallon or so per flush) toilet and 2) most toilets' "functioning internal works" can be adjusted to reduce water usage: all you need to do is lower the position of the float. Oh, and 3) a new low-flow toilet can be had for as little as $100, which the homeowner would recoup in less than two years (savings of 1.5 gallons per flush * 1¢ per gallon * 500 flushes per month, or about fourteen months). Not only that, some municipal water departments will subsidize buying a low-flow toilet. Heck, you can even buy a low-flow conversion kit for about twenty-five bucks.

Ries, unfortunately, didn't know anything about plumbing and precious little about utility bills, as one might expect of a dorm rat or apartment-dweller. That's why we prefer to let people who know what they're talking about give us advice – anyone else is a potential Dumbass of the Day candidate.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_2278885_use-less-water-toilet.html

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