Everybody talks about the problem with leaky toilet flappers, but none of the major plumbing manufacturers has done anything about it.
Until now, with the introduction by American Standard of its Champion toilet, a flapperless design that claims to solve the problems of low-flow toilets: clogging, handle-jiggling, noise - and doing the job with a single flush.
"One of the things people were very unhappy about was flappers," said Michael Friedberger, product development manager for American Standard. If the flapper isn't seated properly after each flush, the toilet runs and runs, wasting the water that a low-flow toilet is supposed to save. Homeowners have to jiggle the handle to try to get the flapper to reseat itself.
Rubber flappers deteriorate from chlorine tablets and chloramines, a mixture of chlorine and ammonia that utilities add to purify water. Once they're eaten away, they no longer perform properly. A faulty flapper that a homeowner replaces with the wrong size is a water waster.
Further, homeowners have long complained that some 1.6-gallon toilets, which have been required by federal law since 1992, don't clear the bowl with one flush. Repeated flushes are sometimes necessary, which defeats the purpose of a low-flow toilet.
So it was back to the drawing board, Friedberger said. "When we could see that we needed to deliver a huge quantity of water very quickly to get the energy needed for the flush, we realized we'd have to develop a whole new system, so we got rid of the flapper."
The American Standard Champion replaces the flapper with a flush tower that pulls up, releasing 1.6 gallons of water with great force into the bowl in less than a second. The tower shuts automatically after the water is released. If you were to flush the toilet again immediately, it would release another 1.6 gallons, but under less pressure, because the water height is lower, Friedberger said, "But you would only do that if the system didn't work right the first time," he said. "This works, it gets the job done, and there's no need to do it again."
The toilet also has what the manufacturer claims is the largest siphon trapway 23/8 inches, compared with the typical 11/2 inches, which it says reduces the possibility of clogging. The trapway is the part of the toilet that carries off the waste. In its test, which can be viewed at www.bestflush.com the toilet flushes away 31 synthetic sponges or 16 cloth napkins or 41 rubber tubes.
The company also got 29 golf balls to disappear in one flush, which tends to impress people at trade shows and product demonstrations, Friedberger said. "The No. 1 response is that people are impressed that it carries that much material out." (This is still probably in the category of "Don't try this at home.")
As for the toilet's quiet functioning, "The paradigm everybody has is that a toilet makes all that noise, lots of water, lots of force. This is so dynamic and so quiet that it's a shock to them. Noise is actually a loss of energy."
The gasket that holds the flush tower tightly in place is made from military-grade silicone rubber, not the vinyl rubber that flappers are made of, and therefore are highly resistant to chemical degradation from chloramines, Friedberger said. The toilet comes with a 10-year warranty.
All this isn't cheap. The Champion toilet, at a "comfort height" of 161/2 inches, has a list price of $408 in white, and $525 in bone or linen. It is available now through plumbing supply houses, showrooms and plumbers. By year's end the company will also offer a standard-height Champion (about 2 inches lower). Eventually - Friedberger had no date - the toilets will be sold at home centers.
"It's probably a good toilet," said Gene Overmyer, president of Water & Energy Savings Corp. in St. Pete Beach, which sells water-saving devices including another kind of flapperless toilet. His major concern was the Champion's cost, which greatly exceeds the price of the Niagara toilet he sells for around $150.
The Niagara holds the water for flushing in a semicylindrical plastic bucket inside the tank, not in the tank itself. When the toilet is flushed, the bucket dumps the water into the tank and out into the bowl to clear the waste. Then the bucket rights itself and refills through a fill valve. Because the tank doesn't need to hold water all the time, it doesn't require a flapper to create a tight seal.
American Standard is sparing no effort to launch the new toilets. On Oct. 28 the toilet was unveiled in New York City by Ty Pennington, the hunky carpenter from Trading Spaces, accompanied by "an unflappable dance troupe" and, according to an e-mailed release, "dramatic flushing demonstrations." They involved both water wigglers and golf balls.
