I said, I meant it, I hate my toilet. There is no more misguided a policy than the low flow toilet mandate. When I moved in here the bathroom was totaled. It was the reason I got this place so cheap, the floor was rotted from a slow leak and the toilet was pink and pretty far from working properly. It ran constantly and needed replacing right away, which is why I got to work on it a full year and a half after I moved in. While shopping for a toilet I fully realized the horror of the low flow toilet. There was no alternative. You could choose the color and shape, but flow capacity was fixed at a minority of liters with just enough force to push feces into the pipe. Now until I got this toilet I had never backed up a toilet before. Ever. I didn't know what to do, I panicked. I shut off the valve, I got a wrench, no water or filth reach the rim, but water that should have gone down was coming up and I couldn't think. I had no plunger because, like I said, this had never happened to me before, so I could only flush. It took about ten tries and I had to wait a while for some ca-ca to decompose, but eventually it went down with a satisfactory sploosh.
The low flow toilet was introduced to counter the conventionally accepted wasting of water. A trickle of pee-pee did not require 9 red blooded American gallons of water to wash it away, so to look at the numbers it was easy to make a case for a low flow toilet. The marketplace - however, did not agree and no one bought them. Honestly, I am a minimalist hippy weirdo and I wouldn't have bought one either. Strain on municipal water supplies and adventurous lobbying firms managed to get this new addendum added to the building code and before you knew it the old Cadillac toilets were on their way to the landfill to be replaced by sporty and efficient new models.
For the first time ever we would wake up to confront our feces staring back at us and you could actually be late for work and be excused just by saying, "I have a low flow toilet." The question kept arising, is it actually saving water if you have to flush it ten times? Considering that it happens maybe once every six months, then yes it is saving water, but that is not the problem. If you ever have a guest at the house and they back up the toilet - Guaranteed - you are sleeping alone tonight. Just the psychological factor of having to look at your own shit and get the plunger out and fill the house with a foul odor, just having to deal with it sucks. It sucks so bad that anyone you ask that ever had to deal with it will tell you enthusiastically and publicly just how much they hate their low flow toilet.
The future holds all sorts of new impositions on our way of life. Cars will become less powerful as peak oil peaks and supply dwindles, our homes will be hotter in the summer with fewer cooling options and the winters harsher and colder with less oil for heat. We can look forward to misery and sacrifice against our wishes, our wishes being for abundance and convenience. There will be less meat in our diets, solar panels on the roof, wider bike lanes, no more plastic bags from the grocery, mandatory recycling and composting, these are all done things. Many municipalities already have these policies, the low flow toilet was just the beginning, but no matter what good comes of it all - I will always HATE that fucking toilet...
TIP: the recycled toilet paper clogs my toilet every time, even treehuggers don't use it.
