Wednesday, 17 March 2010 20:37

Reprinted from GreenBuildingAdvisor.com
A lot of people still point to products like early water-saving toilets, compact-fluorescent lamps, and recycled-plastic-lumber decking as evidence that new-fangled green products don’t work very well. Clearly, there were some poorly performing products out there as manufacturers scrambled to respond to consumer demand and new regulations. But, for the most part, we’ve climbed up that learning curve, and current-generation products work very well.

Let’s take a look at the history of a few of these product categories.

Low-flush toilets

The Energy Policy Act was signed into law in 1992 with a requirement that all toilets sold in the U.S. had to use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf) by January, 1994. That wasn’t much time for the plumbing industry to redesign their toilets, and many of those early 1.6-gpf toilets were indeed pretty unsatisfactory, requiring double flushing and frequent cleaning.

The problem was that those first low-flush toilets weren’t designed from-the-ground-up to use 1.6 gallons for a flush; they were older toilets with bowls and trapways that had been designed to use 3.5 gallons or more; the only change was a modified flush valve that reduced the flush volume. Industry got the message loud and clear, and later models were designed to flush very well with 1.6 gpf—and some with even less. A new test procedure for toilet performance (Maximum Performance or MaP testing), introduced in 2003, helped manufacturers design better toilets by more accurately measuring flush performance.

The bottom line is that complaints about new 1.6 gpf toilets have largely disappeared and, in fact, a new generation of “high-efficiency toilets” (HETs) that use even less water (HETs are defined as using at least 20% less water than the federal standard, or a maximum of 1.28 gpf) often actually outperform those 3.5 gpf toilets that were on the market in 1990. We’re using far less water today and getting better performance.