Toilets are certainly sold in 2 pieces. I would recommend getting a commercial sized bowl. They're MUCH easier on the knees. Not to mention more useable for handicapped people.

Oh, and get a peofessional to install it, that's one install you do NOT want to mess up!

The pressure assist ones have a poly tank inside the actual tank....It holds air and as it fills up with water, the air compresses

What a marvelous, clever idea! I am impressed with whoever thought that one up!

tanstaafl.

They're MUCH easier on the knees

Ummm...

Have you been praying to the Porcelain God recently?

Its called an accumulator they have been used various form for centuries the earliest one i know about where used in tower bridge in london where two huge weights were pumped up in the air using hydraulics and then the stored enegry used to open the bridge.

The clever bit would be the valve inside that would release the pressure when you pull the chain

Ah so you are the one that keeps blocking up the bogs when i was on the cruise ships.

A cruise ship bog is actually quite a complex beast as they operate on a vacum principle so there is a kind of relay vavle in the back that opens up the bowl to the vacum and then it dumps in a tiny amount of water only about 1.5 litres.

From there it gets sucked down into a venturi and then put into a small holding tank. this tank has about 4 pumps atached to it all which draw from the tank and then through the venturis and back into the tank. When the tank reachs a critical mass (or full of [censored]) one pump is then diverted to pumping it out into the shittank (sewage treatment unit). In here it get genrally bubbled around and mixed up and oxygenated so the the jobbie eaters (bacteria) can break it down. Then it goes into the cholrination tank where it get chlorinated and then we pump it into a tank to dump at night.

Now any man made system it has problems there is a very course filter before the venturi (granny piss filter) which can find all sorts of strange things in it, towels, faulse teeth, clothes jewlery (yes we can find your ring if you are lucky if you flush it) etc This filter occasionally get blocked. A favorite fault is when the first holding tank overflows or explodes which has happened then vent got blocked and it overpressurised and spilt dumping about 20 tons of sewage into the compartment.

Also we have a vacum pressure metre which monitors the system vacum this tells us if we have a stuck bog which can collapse the vacum and no ones toilet works in a certain area. This metre is attached to a data logger system which tells us many things about the passengers habits.

So respect that cruise ship bog

If you mounted the cistern higher, like they used to, you could get away with at smaller amount of water because it is coming out at a higher pressure/rate.

are there any topics this BBS hasn't discussed?

One of the early innovators was one "Thomas Crapper"

Thomas Crapper is back in business, his shop in the King's Road, Chelsea was a source of great hilarity in the '60's, when I socialised in those parts!

You will find his catalogue here

Whilst Rob is here, it seems a pity not to smuggle an original on to a plane, rather than a Canadian copy, he'll probably get in the Guinness book of records that way.

Forget smuggling. I want to see photos of Rob carrying a toilet bowl around various airports. It just _has_ to be done...can you imagine placing such an item on the xray converyor belt? I wonder how the guy operating the scanner would react!

That's a good idea for a Tom Green episode.

I just wonder what they'd sit you on while waiting for you to pass a toilet.

Peter

I can't believe other people are actually having this conversation..... Since I just had it the other night with a buddy of mine who is a plummer.

He's not aware of any regulations about "importing" a toilet from Canada (you can own one in the U.S. you just can't legally hook it up.) The tricky part, at least for me, would be getting it installed. Where I am you actually need to pull a permit to replace a toilet. Since that's the case no plummer will install it. All's I'd have to do install an illegal toilet (can they get a search warrant for that)?

I'm resonably sure that I will go to Canada at some point to get a toilet. I probably can't do it on this coming trip because it is a Saab run and there are all kinds of twisty bits at high rates of speed.

However, I will own a Canadian toilet!

You could get it after the run.

If your making an actual suggestion instead of some joke about having the runs, that is not really doable. The run ends in back in NY about 2-3 hours from the border.

Details of the run can be seen here.

The tricky part, at least for me, would be getting it installed

My suggestion would be to get a "Do-it-yourself" book. They're a piece of cake to install if you're just replacing one and the plumbing is already there. You could probably do it in an hour or two.

I have seen a toilet completely removed and then installed again by a professional. It looked pretty easy and he was very quick. I think getting the toilet will be harder than installing it.

If it is an old bog it might be leaded into the old pipe so i could be quite hard to get out (in one piece) and then putting it back would involve getting a rubber bellows type thing the bog plugs into so i would get a pro in.

Now - it's not every BBS that has a discussion which mentions jobbie eaters. Or even jobbies in general.

The Big Yin would be so proud

Is now a good time to explain Scots slang to the geographically challenged (those who don't live in Scotland) ???

Not that I can ever forget the home of the deep fried mars bar or a wonderful pint of heavy.

Just to make things easier...

You can modify a us toilet to higher flow. Many are built with oversize tanks (you can identidy these by the water level mark inside, if it's only half way up, it'll hold more water) and you can install a float valve meant for an older tank in it. I've done this and it works as well as the old ones did.

I'm coming a bit late to this thread, but I was noticing that my toilets happen to be of the 1.6 gallon/flush variety, yet in four years of living in my house, I've never once had a flush gone wrong.

Turns out, my toilets are made by Kohler. Looking inside the tank, I didn't see anything particularly fancy. The floats are the modern round type that moves vertically on a pole, rather than the older ball on the end of an arm.

When you flush, the bowl drains in four seconds flat, and then starts refilling. I think that's part of the trick to making low-flow toilets work properly. While I'm not completely certain, I think I have Kohler Wellworth toilets, which use their "Ingenium" mechanism. Check out their animated flush.

In this report about low flow toilets, the Kohler Wellworth is singled out as being bad.

"Switching to water-efficient plumbing fixtures could save the average household as much as $50 to $100 a year on water and wastewater bills." George Whalen

That would be impressive. I think my entire wastewater bill for the year is under $100.

Yowza. He really loves the Toto UltraMax toilets. To be fair, he says "Just fair is the Kohler Wellworth... Kohler has had their problems their 81100 flushing systems." The Wellworth, for what it's worth, appears not to have the 81100 flushing system.

Of course, if you want true indestructability, you have to go with Penal-Ware, or perhaps the slightly less penal consumer versions.

Fair enough. I assumed that the two Kohler items were related. I guess not. Still ``fair'' is far from a compliment.

Penal Ware is suicide resistant?? i don't even want to know how one kills oneself with a toilet.

I think it probably has to do with things to tie things around and sharp edges or the ability to gain sharp edges.