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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

Newer toilets in the US are only allowed 6 liters max.

And those toilets can never seem to handle my #2s. You're not saving anything if you have to flush 2-3 times and use a plunger every time.

Regulating the volume of the tank is useless unless you also define a test standard for functionality.

It's like saying that cars have to meet a minimum mileage standard without also specifying that they have to be able to maintain 60 mph while going up a 10% grade. Except in that situation, cars that do not meet the implicit minimum consumer standard don't get purchased off the lot. In houses, the person who buys the toilet is more likely planning to repackage it into an entire house and resell it to someone else than use it personally. So your toilet might look like a full-sized sedan, but have a go-kart engine under the hood. They just bolted a smaller tank onto a base that was designed for a larger flush volume.

So what those toilets are allowed de jure is not necessarily lowering de facto water use.

Yes, there are toilets out there that were redesigned for low flush volumes, and they do save water, but they have not displaced the letter-of-the-law, flush-it-twice toilets in the construction of cut-every-possible-corner suburban subdivisions.

So true! I rarely shit in US&A, but when I do, I must average close to 3 flushes per shit.

I don't usually have to use a plunger (thankfully, since I don't live there and only shit there as a guest). But I've learned through hard experience: the Americans basically gave up on the toilet 100+ years ago.

Cold as fuck porcelain, rarely a slow-seat-lowering mechanism, no stain-resistant adherence-resistant polymers, no way you're getting any heated seats or odor-suppressing intake fans than vent air through filters, and, for whatever reason (asshole/vagina-squeamish culture?) there are virtually no spraywash/bidet type features...and to add insult to injury they can't even reliably flush a man-size shit down !!! :-O

I mean, they usually do, but any failure rate above 0.01% will make you quickly learn that you should just flush, then wipe, and if you feel like you need to wipe a bit extra this time, just flush again mid-wipe, and once more at the end.

logfromblammo I am so utterly with you: flush-test the toilets (and fuck it, if we ban toilets that use too much water, we should ban toilets that can't reliably flush a heavy load).

P.S. Yes, I live in Japan, the world's only toilet-superpower, and yes, I've ranted on this topic before on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4787587).

Actually they do. This is a common thing. The majority of bathroom usage is for urination only, so if you do the math it works out.

Think of it like this. Lets say there were 10 toilet usages in a day, 8 urination and 2 defecation. If a flush takes 5 units of water, and works for either situation, that is 50 units of water a day.

Now you replace the toilet with one that uses 2 units of water but takes 3 flushes to clear defecation. 8 of your uses take 2 units, 2 of your uses take 6 units (3 flushes) total units of water 16 + 12 or 28 units. You save 22 units of water a day.

Or you could just get a toilet with separate flush buttons for #1 vs. #2. Which avoids both waste of water and waste of time and other problems from inadequate flow.

There's a saying in our house (we're on rain tanks):

"If it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down".

If everyone acted like that, then toilets could have a good, decent flush, powerful enough to purge any normal mud dragon.

From a legislative perspective, that would be a great reason to mandate that all new construction include at least one urinal per bathroom (and that they be suitable for use by untrained females), and a horrible reason to mandate a lower tank size/flush volume on toilets that may be used for defecation.

But no matter what you do regarding toilet laws, the benefit simply vanishes in the noise when you also consider agricultural/industrial water use. It is pissing into a hurricane-force wind.

Domestic use in the US is 40.5 km^3/year, of which maybe 4.1 km^3/year is used in toilets (both for intentional flushes and leaks). Total freshwater use in the US is 483 km^3/year. A 50% reduction in water use for toilets would amount to a 0.5% reduction in total water use. For comparison purposes, 23.5 km^3/year of domestic water is used outdoors, for watering lawns and gardens or for filling swimming pools.

From a purely legislative perspective, it makes more sense to mandate leak-resistant flush valves than the size of the tank. It makes even more sense to strike down at a federal level all local zoning laws and HOA covenants that mandate a certain appearance for lawns, to explicitly allow alternate yard arrangments, such as xeriscaping and no-mow approaches, on residential properties. That would save more water in total than you could even by mandating that toilets could not use any water at all. And even that would pale in comparison to laws requiring just a 4% reduction in water use in steam-turbine power plants or in agricultural irrigation.

If you do the math, the burden of regulating toilet flush volume far outweighs the benefits from doing so. While you were counting flushes, one leak in one pivot irrigation rig just wasted more water than you will ever save in your entire lifetime of flushing toilets. This is my problem with individual environmentalism. An individual human already wastes so little that sacrificing just a bit more for the sake of the planet is easily flushed away by industry that has zero incentive--economic or regulatory--to conserve limited resources. You can drive a zero-emissions vehicle for an entire lifetime of commuting, and that benefit is more than erased by just one container ship burning bunker oil to ship consumer goods from Shanghai to Long Beach one time.

I pay by the cubic foot for municipal water, and I pay again for the municipal sewers and water treatment. For what I pay, I expect to be able to actually get my solid waste into the sewers without some jackass telling me how much water I can use to do it without also telling the toilet vendor that their product has to be able to do the job with that volume. Regulation for the public good is fine. Idiotic regulation, that does not accomplish the intended purpose, is not okay.

What I hear when I read your reply is this:

   > I pay by the cubic foot for municipal water, and I pay
   > again for the municipal sewers and water treatment. For
   > what I pay, I expect to be able to actually get my
   > solid waste into the sewers without some jackass
   > telling me how much water I can use to do it ...

This "I pay X so its my choice" is the basis for a number of arguments on water conservation. If it is the only argument that carries weight with you, then the legislative response will be 'use what ever you want, your water cost will be exponential per unit time' So the first 100 units a month, are $1, the next 100 units are $10, the next $100, etc. The allows the cost of profligate water use to be borne by the responsible party rather than the community.

And yes, it is true that agricultural use dwarfs urban use. But the same logic applies. Someone trying to grow almonds in the desert should pay more than someone trying to grow beans.

Not exactly. What people pay for water should be uniform and proportional to the cost of providing it. I am not a fan of influencing behavior through taxation and subsidy. That is itself wasteful and inefficient.

You don't even need to have bracketed, progressively higher rates for water use. It would be enough to just stop subsidizing those who use the most.

Less than 1% of human-used freshwater in the US goes through toilets.

Personally, I don't bother to optimize code unless the profiler says it is heavily used. I am probably not going to mess with a routine that only accounts for 1% of execution until well after I have optimized the hell out of the two functions that collectively account for 80% of CPU time. (Analogy-wise, that's power plants and irrigation.)

Of course, given enough developers, someone will eventually have to optimize out at the edges. There's no reason to say we can't tackle toilets at the same time as pivot irrigators; it's just that any work done on them will be inherently less valuable. You're not going to need your best people on it. And any gains will be small.

It isn't entirely about improving performance at that point. Anything I do to shave microseconds from that 1%-used function is likely to introduce additional bugs into the code--such as failures in one of the two major use cases for it. (Poop remains in the bowl after I flush.) That's not so bad if I set up unit tests beforehand, because I then know when I have broken something.

But where are your unit tests for toilet flushing, Mr. Legislator? Nowhere. They don't bother with the profiler or with unit tests. So they end up with shitty code.

The replacement toilets have never clogged, even with the entirety of a toilet paper roll being emptied into them (slight exaggeration).

The lack of water in the bowl concerned me, but the "flushing power" makes up for it. I've had them installed for about two years now and the kids' toilets hasn't had anything that couldn't be flushed.

But, as you mention, these aren't contractor-grade toilets. Indeed, those do suck. I've used plenty.

There's definitely better and worse models. The ones the builder put in my house are pretty iffy. But the Eljer I put in my finished basement has never clogged.

Yes, and this is good. However, porcelain toilets kept in relatively good condition seem to last forever. The ones I was replacing were original to the home (30 years).

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