The Toilet Flushing Mystery

Today I'm going to talk about the mystery of toilet flushing, because for the life of me, I can't see a good explanation for this nonsense. Those of you who have a newish home will know what I'm talking about. Those that have an older home, you might want to bring your toilets with you when you sell. Let me tell you why.

In the old days, back when we could flush Matchbox cars, Barbie, and our foot down the toilet, the tanks contained 5 gallons of water to push everything down. Then the environmentalists decided to get involved in order to "cut down on waste thus saving the environment" and to push it to consumers "save us money on our water and sewer bill." So the flush capacity was lowered from 5 gallons to 3.5 gallons. Still enough to get some good toys down the line, or that random pet alligator that seemed like a good idea at the time.

But then they struck again. In 1994, it became law that all toilets would be lowered to a 1.6 flush capacity. So in a matter of a years we lost almost 70% of our flushing capacity. The problem...no one changed the design of the original toilet. It still depends on gravity to push the water through creating the flush effect. There's no turbo wheel down in the bowl creating better suction to make up for the lack of water weight.

The result. Well, God forbid you need to do anything but number one AND you stock your home with anything but that industrial toilet paper that is so thin you could do major surgery peering through it. Because if you do, your likely to clog your toilet. I would bet that 50% of the time, I have to break out my plunger for completely normal bathroom activities. No Barbies, no alligators. Just toilet paper and the other stuff that's supposed to be in the toilet.

The secondary result. I now flush 3 times in order to avoid the plunger games. Sooooooooooo THANK YOU ENVIRONMENTALISTS AND PLEASE GET A MATH EDUCATION.

By my figuring, my old 3.5 tank, which worked fine was flushing 3.5 gallons of water. But my NEW, FANCY, LOW CAPACITY, SAVE-THE-ENVIRONMENT-FROM-ALL-THOSE-BAD-PEOPLE-WHO-NEED-TO-GO-POTTY version, I use 4.8 gallons per bathroom trip.

Congratulations, you've succeeded in using even more water, running up my bill AND reminding me why I think there ought to be an IQ test to even breathe in this country.

BTW - for those of you dealing with this terror, you can adjust the flap in the back for a little bit better action. Lord help us all, but I might be getting another .2 gallons of water in a flush, thus allowing me to flush a whole time less.

Anyone else have this problem? If so, what have you done about it? Unless you're walking around with the red-booty from that cheap toilet paper....I'm simply not going there. I'm a Charmin woman.

Deadly DeLeon