Over the past season I’ve become intimately acquainted with my right-hand water fixture. Nope, I didn’t have the flu and yep - my pipes are in great shape. Instead of a sickly me hanging over the toilet bowl, a curious me tinkered around with the twoflush toilet conversion kit by Alberta company Aquanotion.

Toilets & Water Conservation

Eco-rhetoric calls on us all to meditate upon the final destination of our sewage post-flush. But there’s only so much meditating one can do without a bit of plumbing experience. Environment Canada tells us that our ‘retro style’ 18 litre toilets slurp up “30 000 litres of clean, fresh water per year just to get rid of 650 litres of body waste” while newer 6 litre models sip only a third of that to do the same job.

To Upgrade or to Retrofit

The water savings alone are enough to make anyone want to dump old faithful for a younger more evolved comparable. And though it was a tough decision, I committed to making it work with my current throne. Just think of all those old toilets piled up in the dumpster. I know what you’re thinking, but sadly not everyone wants a toilet planter in their yard.

(Image credit: Becky’s Public Gallery)

The Savings

Given that my baseline flush was a sloshy 19 Liters and assuming a conservative 4 uses per day per person, my rough water consumption from this unit works out to 19 L x 4 flushes x 2 users x 365 days = 55,480 L. Taking into account that while both users work from home, we’re not home all the time. So let’s cut that figure by 20%, leaving 44,384 Liters.

With my setup, the liquids flush uses 8.5 Litres, and the solids flush to 13.88 Litres. Here’s the math.

(*365 days less 20%, **My utility charges 153.62¢ per cubic meter for water, and 99.69¢ per cubic meter for drainage.)

Being a stingy water user, I was underwhelmed by these water savings at first. High efficiency toilets on today’s market can be sourced out that use a mere 4 Litres per flush. That would mean a 79% water savings for me.

Then I realized that my kit will pay for itself within one year. With a kitchen reno and some basement work to finish up not to mention a beautiful autumn to enjoy, toilet replacement won’t be happening for me before 1-2 years is up anyway.

If you are considering a twoflush or two, it’s worth noting that your water savings will depend on your individual unit’s flushing abilities. If it flushes reliably with a decent amount of pressure, you’ll be able to adjust the kit to use even less water than mine. If the payback figure is important to you, take a peek at your utility’s water and drainage charge.

Who Should Take the Plunge?

You’ve probably already figured out that if you have the time and the budget, you’re better off selecting a high efficiency toilet rather than retrofitting.

But, if you’re holding off on purchasing a high efficiency toilet for financial or other reasons for at least a year or two, and have a high volume unit, the twoflush makes solid environmental and financial sense. Business owners with a few employees or rental property managers where tenants do not pay their own water bill can also profit from the twoflush.

Truly, this kit is for anyone who’d like to cut their environmental impact by saving water and keeping bulky toilets out of the landfill.

Installation Pointers

The Twoflush web site says that a plumber should be able to install the kit in an hour. I can turn a wrench, so I multiplied that by three to be conservative. I won’t say just how long it took me, but I will say that having our highest-use toilet out of order for a stint far longer than three hours caused a few near-accidents and a headache or two. To save you from this fate, here are my pointers:

• The styrofoam piece on the main plastic tube is not packaging. Do not break it off and throw it away. If you do end up breaking it, two part epoxy works really well.

• Read all of the instructions before starting the job. Look inside your toilet tank as you read each step to familiarize yourself with all the parts referenced.

• The small paper clarifying step 5 of the instructions actually has a parts list on the back. It is instrumental to your understanding how to assemble the kit.

• Wipe the floor surrounding the toilet. You’ll be spending some time laying there when detaching and reattaching the tank to the bowl.

• If your toilet is quite old like mine, expect a trip to the hardware store to get replacement parts. Your rubber washers are bound to have disintegrated. My new toilet bolts cost me $5.28 plus GST, although I reused the old nuts because the wingnuts that came with the bolts didn’t fit.

• Remove the guts of your toilet gingerly. The ball broke off my rod. A new one costs about $4 and yes, you still need it (without this, your toilet tank will continuously overflow).

• It’s not obvious in the drawings provided, but the grey arm corresponds to the smaller flush handle, and actually hooks in under the white arm and through the hole in the release fork. The white arm corresponds to the larger flush handle.

• Your flushes may use too much water even with the kit installed. This happens when your refill tube pulls on the plunger, preventing your tower from closing and saving water. You can correct this by loosening the other tower and twisting it slightly to release the tension on the refill tube. (Drain the tank first!). Make sure your ball and rod doesn’t touch or rest on any of the kit parts. I only had about half an inch of play between the two.
• To reduce the amount of water consumed for a full solids flush, loosen the plastic nut on the ball arm, bend the ball arm down, and re-tighten to lock it into place. One or two inches of adjustment makes a lot of difference!

Believe it or not, installing the twoflush was an adventure that I truly appreciated. After detaching and reattaching the tank to the bowl and adjusting the position of the parts several times, I’ve come away with a deeper understanding of the inner-workings of my twoflush toilet. Knowing we’re saving in excess of 4700 gallons of water - enough to fill 134 bathtubs - makes it all worth while.

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