Green Home Improvement Project: High Efficiency Toilets

The introduction to the series of articles focusing on ways to go "green" with your home improvement projects will focus on an item in your home that sees significant use. This item is simple, use multiple times daily, and replacing it can save you hundreds of dollars per year. Even more interesting, such a simple change can help save the environment and there are no trade-offs for updating this item.

What item are we talking about? None other than your toilet. If you have an older home built prior to the 1990's chances are high that you have an old high capacity toilet. Many of these toilets use up to 3.5 gallons of water every time you flush it. If you house is even older, than you may have a toilet that uses more than 5 gallons of water per flush.

The capacity of these old toilets may not sound that high, but the amount of water used quickly adds up. An average household flushes their toilet 10 times per day. That's about 35 gallons of water used per day or more than 245 gallons per week or more than 10,000 gallons of water per year. Now that's a lot of water. Many households have more than one toilet and could flush their toilets even more than the average number listed above.

In recent years, standards have been set allowing toilets to use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush. Some new toilets use much less water than this. Some use between .8 and 1.2 gallons per flush. These water saving toilets perform as well as or better than their old high capacity counterparts. Modern technology has brought the low flow toilets up to par in terms of performance with the older, less efficient toilets of yesterday.

Put into perspective, a 1.6 gallon per flush toilet can save the average household over 5,000 gallons of water per year. That amount of water is enough to fill a small above ground pool. Depending upon charges for water in your area, a 5,000 gallons savings could save you anywhere between $35 and $100 per year. If you choose to go with the even more efficient .8 gallon per flush toilet, than you can save an additional 2,500 gallons of water.

Replacing your toilet will save you money on you yearly water bills, but also consider that you are saving the environment by limiting your water usage.

So if your toilet is in need of replacement or you just want to save some money on water bills or you want to help conserve water, now's the time to replace your toilet with a low flow model. It's a win win choice that will improve your home in many ways.