Tankless Toilets in the home - when space in the bathroom is an issue.

Flush with knowledge on a new subject means a new hub is born...

I recently posted a hub about my friend's experiences selecting and purchasing a new replacement toilet for his home. In that hub, I discussed his eventual decision to go with a model from the toto drake toilet line of toilets because of its overall positive reputation. One other thing that I forgot to mention at the time but that I found curious was that my friend had briefly toyed with the idea of having a tankless toilet installed in his home. when he first told me this I asked hinm the obvious question: why?

He said that he wasn't very familiar with the details of the concept but that he had been led to believe that a tankless toilet was a good choice if you wanted a toilet to take up less space in your bathroom and if you wanted a toilet with a powerful flushing action. After looking into the matter, he decided that any potential benefit would not be worth the time and expense of having one installed in his home. After hearing this, I was curious to find out what is actually involved with having a tankless toilet in your home, and so (just for the sake of this curiosity) I accessed that boundless source of knowledge, the internet, and looked into the subject of tankless toilets.

Having the time to read up on tankless toilets means that you have too much time on your hands. Finding the time to post a hub on the subject to share your findings with the world means that you have way too much time on your hands.

So we all know that with the standard tank toilet it is the existence of gravity that makes the toilet function. That it is gravity that allows the water in the bowl to be exchanged for the water in the tank. Obviously, because there is no tank involved in the process the tankless toilet operates ona different principle or technology. The absence of a tank means that there is more freedom of design and that aesthetics can therefore be a larger part of the design. Of course, the basic idea of effluents or wastes being removed through an opening valve to the pipes below and away from the home to the sewer is still in play. So what is the idea behind tankless toilets? Well, the basic idea is that the tankless toilet uses both volume and pressure to bring clean water in right from the waterpipes of the house or apartment building where they have been installed and into the toilet bowl which has just been emptied. The bowl only allows a designated or predetermined amount of water in and then the valve closes, completing the flushing process. Assuming that the valve mechanism is functioning properly, overflowing toilet bowls should not really be a concern.

The tankless toilet uses a pretty powerful pump mechanism that runs on electricity; it is this pump that produces the pressure needed for the flush action to occur. A tankless toilet refills really quickly after it is flushed: that is one of the benefits of the system that it uses. It is also rather easy to activate the flushing mechanism, since all it requires is the push of a button to activate the pump and complete a flush. The pump mechanism is contained within the bowl itself. What does vary is the way that the water pipe can connect up to the toilet bowl; you can either have the bowl up against the wall and have the pipeline connect to the bowl by coming out of the wall and into it, have the pipe emerge from the floor and into the bowl from below, or have a plumbing pipe go from the back of the bowl across the floor a short distance and into the wall where it links up with the interior plumbing. I was surprised to read that although many toilet manufactures will tell you that a 1/2" pipe width is sufficient for a tankless toilet, it is actually recommended that you install at least a 1" width of pipe, otherwise you might find that your home's tankless toilet does not have enough pressure or volume to fill quickly and instead needs to continue the flushing process for a prolonged period of time to sufficiently fill the bowl. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a smoother, quicker flush, eh? I mentionmed earlier that my friend decided against installing such a toilet system why did he decide against one? Pretty much it came down to the fact that a tankless toilet requires certain kinds of water supply lines, and if these are not existent when the toilet is installed, well then you need to have them installed as part of your home's plumbing system. Obviously, if you are having anew home built from the ground up the cost is just a part of construction, however, if you are considering having a tankless toilet installed in your present existing home then having the system put in can be costly. This was the situation that my buddy was faced with and the main reason he decided against going that route. Another potential problem is with the power source: having a toilet in your home that relies on electricity for the flush ing process means that you are pretty much at the mercy of your home or even your neighborhood's local power grid. Each time your electricity goes out and you lose power, you also lose the ability to flush your home's toilet! If your area suffers from any kind of irregularities with your power supply then you could be looking at some ongoing frustrations with the functionality of your home's toilet,and obviously, nobody wants the reliability of their home's toilet to wind up in the crapper...

The Toto drake toilet - a hub looking at what many consider to be the standard of quality in standard home toilets.

fromattictobasement.bakeradio.com: Another site on the web that you might want to check out for a similar perspective on the tankless toilet and its domestic potential.