Dual-flush toilet

In our everyday life, we often waste a lot of energy and resources. When we go to the bathroom and take long showers or when we brush our teeth and leave the faucet on. These habits are relatively easy to change, aren’t they? You only need to come up with a way to spend less time in the shower and to remember to turn the faucet off when you aren’t using it. But going to the bathroom often implies using the toilet too. I don’t know about you, but flushing has always bothered me. Not because I don’t like to flush (eww), but because I think a lot of water goes to waste by doing so. Until know,

I didn’t know what to do to save water. But I figured out a way and I’m going to share with you my recent discovery. Here it goes.

The dual-flush toilet

The first time someone put a dual flush toilet into use was in 1980.  So I guess we could say that it’s not a recent invention. Dual flush toilets are a variation of the standard siphon-flush toilet which uses a siphoning tube to evacuate waste. When the toilet is flushed, a high volume of water fills the tube and pulls the water and waste down the drain. Dual flush toilets don’t need as much water given that they don’t have a siphon and waste exits the bowl easily thanks to a larger trapway (=the tubing on the side of the toilet through which the water flows).

 But I haven’t yet told you about their most important feature (in fact that’s how they got their name), they have 2 buttons for releasing water, depending on the type of waste being flushed: one of them is for liquid waste (half flush) and the other for solid waste (full flush). As I said, dual-flush toilets use less water than regular toilets. To be more precise: standard toilets require 11 liters of water per flush, while dual-flush toilets only need 5 liters. If you decide to change your regular toilet, you’ll see this reflected at the end of the month, your water bills will be reduced in 70%. The only but: dual-flush toilets are a bit more expensive than regular ones, but they are a long-term inversion that will allow you to save                                                           money and preserve water resources.

The two buttons that release different volumes of water