Columnists

My partner and I are warily embarking on a bathroom renovation. We’re skirting around it, starting with peripheral components and seeing how it goes. To give you an idea of what that means, we’re beginning our reno by repairing our downstairs bathroom first, so it will be OK to use when our other bathroom’s a mess. The downstairs bathroom has some cracked tile, and we found extra pieces of the tile in our basement (thank you, former owner!), so we’ll learn how to cut and affix tile in our “practice” bathroom first. We’ll also practice replacing a toilet. That sounds easy, but ahh, you have to choose a new toilet before you can install it!

After much review of the models at various home stores and manufacturer’s websites, and consideration of factors such as bowl shape, bowl height, insulated tank, style and colour, we wanted to consider the environmental factors as well. Luckily, most of the available toilets are now water misers at six litres per flush compared to the 13 litres some older models use. But I discovered a type of toilet that I think makes particular sense: the dual flush toilet. These toilets use half the water to do their No. 1 job, so you save a lot of water just by pressing the right button. And apparently the City of Toronto agrees: they offer $60 or $75 rebates for replacing a toilet with an efficient model, and the toilet we chose earns a $75 rebate. Even if you don’t live in Toronto, you may find their list of water-saving toilets helpful.

In purchasing a toilet, performance is the other major factor. After all, you’re not saving water if you have to flush twice. This page provides background on the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ testing standards and links to a list of performance reports by toilet model.

Now we just need to install the toilet! Let me know if you have any tips!