Sunday, September 30, 2012

Proficiency Toilets - 18 months later


It has been a while since my last post.  Between family, work, renovations and the blog, the blog often finished last. The good news is that the renovations kept moving forward with good progress on several fronts.  I am hoping to starting posting on a regular basis so that the blog can catch up and share all that news.  But to get back in the rhythm, I figured I would make this a quick and simple follow-up to my review on the Proficiency toilet (or Stealth as it is sold in the states).

One concern I had when writing my original post was that my initial impressions may not reflect long term performance.  Now that we have 18 months of use under our belt, I am much more confident stating that this toilet exceeded all my expectations.

As a reminder or for those that did not read the initial post, at 3L per flush this toilet is arguably the most efficient flush toilet on the market.  It uses 77% less water than our old toilet and 25% less than most other very high efficiency toilets.

Has it clogged? Yes.  But under conditions that would have stymied our old 13L as well.  We have a toddler in the house and it is amazing what ends up in our toilet bowl.  But under regular conditions it has performed virtually flawlessly.  We did have one issue early on when there was a significant reduction in performance.  For several flushes it seemed sluggish and struggled to clear the bowl.   Even though water was flowing, we plungered the bowl and the performance returned to normal.  I believe what happened was that there was an obstruction in the vacuum tube.  Without the vacuum assist is was just 3 litres of water trying to clear the bowl.

One of the most telling things about the toilet: we get no comments.  We have had numerous house guests and visitors filter through in the last year and a half and no one comes out of the bathroom perplexed: it looks like a conventional toilet (including the size of the water spot) and it performs like a conventional toilet . It just quietly and consistently does it job, which to be honest is all we were asking of it..