• Check Its Bathroom before Buying House

    Date: 2011.10.01 | Category: Bathroom, Home Decoration, Home Remodelling, House & Home | Tags: ,

    toilet 184x300 Check Its Bathroom before Buying HouseI went to flush the toilet in the downstairs bathroom this morning. Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. I removed the top of the tank and looked in. Sure enough, the piece of copper connecting the flush handle arm to the flapper had broken after years of use. I was terrified.

    Could I repair the mechanism? If I couldn’t repair it, could the plumber find a replacement mechanism that would let me keep the 3.5 gallon per flush, problemfree toilet. Or would I be forced to replace it with one of those lowflow, 1.6 gallon per flush models?

    The reason for my concern: Despite years of testing and frequent announcements that all the bugs have been worked out, 1.6 gallon per flush, low-flow toilets still present problems. Many owners of low-flow toilets say that it takes two or three flushes to get rid of the same waste that a 3.5 gallon per flush older model would wash away in one try.

    If you are remodeling a bathroom, you’ll have to deal with lowflow toilets, because federal law requires them in residential applications. My advice: If you don’t have to replace your current 3.5 gallon toilet, don’t. In a recent list of water-saving recommendations, the nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy (http://www.ase.org), in Washington, D.C., purposely left off low-flow toilets.

    The advocacy group said that focus groups of consumers spent entire sessions complaining about the toilets, and there didn’t seem to be much advantage to listing technology that people didn’t like alongside front-loading washing machines, which save water and energy at the same time.

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