Review of the American Standard Champion Toilet

American Standard advertises its Champion toilet as having one of the best flushing systems on the planet. They have video of the Champion flushing away up to twenty-four golf balls at once. I've tried to verify this claim by performing my own in-home test, but so far I've only been able to swallow a maximum of twelve golf balls at one sitting, and I won't know for sure whether the Champion can even handle that many until about twenty-four hours from now.

All I can say is the guys at American Standard who tested this thing must have large stomachs and strong teeth.

I did discover that mustard is better than ketchup for increasing the palatability of golf balls, and Titleists taste a bit spicier than Pro Flights.

I purchased my Champion Toilet at Lowes home improvement warehouse store. The tank and bowl had to be purchased separately. Apparently American Standard wants to make sure you have plenty of options in case some acid-dropping homeowner out there wants a two-tone tank and bowl combo. The price was a little steep ($299.98 by the time I'd added the usual toilet replacement items, such as a wax ring and extra flange bolts) for a toilet that doesn't use electricity, but with my diet I figured I could use the assurance that anything I ate would be processed by the toilet and sent far, far away from my living quarters with one pull of the lever. Our prior toilet required the constant close proximity of a plunger.

I had my doubts about the toilet at the beginning of my research for "something better". Just because a toilet can flush down twenty-four golf balls doesn't necessarily mean it is the miracle Americans have been searching for ever since the federal government invaded our most personal activity and mandated that no one could sell a toilet in the U.S. that had a tank capacity larger than that required for a single guppy to live a minimum of one week in. I'd be more impressed if they could demonstrate it flushing something more realistic, like five pounds of polish sausage or eight nine-ounce wads of soft roofing tar mixed with peanuts and corn kernels.

Having been robbed of water volume by the environmentalist activist infiltration of congress, American toilet manufacturers have been in a semi-lack-luster search ever since for the magic combination of channel widths, valves, and pressure regulation to achieve a high performance flush. You might call it a "race for the bottom". Some have developed relatively expensive residential versions of commercial "pressure" tanks that use air compression developed in a sealed tank by water entry to achieve greater speed in driving what little water the government allows us to use for each flush into the bowl and down the pipe as fast as possible. Those toilets tend to be noisy and expensive.

I've done my own tests using high pressure to force a faster flush, but it involves a complex methodology of timing and consuming large quantities of Mexican fast food (fast being a term with multiple connotations in this case).

Installation of the Champion toilet was pretty much the same as any other traditional toilet. I followed the instructions that came with the bowl and tank to the letter. Unlike the gripes of some users on the product review and troubleshooting forums I perused while researching the best toilet to purchase, I had no trouble getting the Champion toilet installed properly. There were no leaks, and the seal between the tank and bowl gave me no problems. I was very careful to slowly and evenly tighten down the tank bolts in alternating fashion (1/2 turn on one side, then 1/2 turn on the other) until, exactly as the instructions said, the tank bottom barely contacted the ridge at the front and back of the bowl unit.

I turned on the water supply and the tank filled. I'm fortunate to have excellent water pressure at my house, and it filled in about 20 seconds. I flushed and the water whooshed down and out of the bowl in a very satisfying manner.

The new throne has been in use for two days now, and so far I'm pleased. It is living up to the advertised claims. While I haven't flushed down any golf balls, it is definitely making the standard items that sewer lines were designed to carry disappear most excellently. It is probably the best performance you will find in a toilet manufactured after the water conservation actions of your national congressmen and congresswomen.

There is still one other alternative for those who insist on volume over efficiency: If you have time to wait for one to be shipped to you and you don't mind contributing to the "wasting" of water that your overloads in Washington, D.C. oppose, you can still order a good old-fashioned high-capacity toilet from suppliers in Canada instead of paying for an American Standard Champion.

If you're my age or older, you probably remember growing up with those toilets. Toilets that little kids were terrified of and dogs refused to drink from for fear they'd be sucked into the vortex as the resulting vacuum actually moved the air in the house during the flush cycle causing your hair to momentarily flutter in a post-flush breeze.

Yep, those were real toilets we had back in the good ol' days.