Stealth Dual Flush
Our next inspection will be the plumbing rough in so I’m working on the master bathroom. I had purchased all the faucets and fixtures except for the toilet. When I was at the Sustainability Fair in Fort Collins, I heard about the Stealth toilet from Niagara, which is an ultra high efficiency toilet they were installing city-wide.
These toilets sell at the local Home Depot for $150 and have a .8 gallon single flush. But I also noticed that there is a new dual flush toilet that uses only .5 gallon for liquids and .95 for solids for an average of .65. That is about the lowest water use available. I was able to find this toilet at Wayfair for the discounted price of $109.99 each for the tank and the toilet bowl. However I also saw that I could order from Wayfair through ebay, which has a pretty good shipping guarantee itself so I ordered from ebay for the same price and the toilet arrived quicker than promised.
It was well packaged, which is good since it is a fragile shipment. The box for the tank was in a smaller box that was completely enclosed in shipping peanuts and foam in a larger box. Same for the bowl. These toilets come in comfort height and I purchased the elongated bowl. The design is similar to a Briggs Vacuity toilet sold in the 90’s, in that it is vacuum-assisted instead of a full vacuum toilet. The design of the Vacuity had mixed results but apparently there were some manufacturing problems with its trapway not the tank technology.
A vacuum toilet has an inner tank that is kept under vacuum pressure and flushes very loudly. We have one in our Indiana house because a normal toilet sweated so much it was rotting the drywall behind it. The vacuum toilet solved that problem. But it has a loud whooshing sound that is even scary for little kids when it is flushed. This vacuum assisted toilet is supposed to have a very quiet flush.
Vacuum assisted means that there is air behind the water in the tank and in the trap. The air forms a vacuum that pushes water up into the bowl and pulls water down when water is released during a flush.
Vacuum Assist Toilet
There is a similar explanation on the Stealth Toilet website. Here is a diagram of the internal tank.
Stealth Dual Flush Tank Schematic
I’m excited about this dual flush system. If it works as well as the cheaper (free for us because I got it through Craigslist) Glacier Bay 1.1/1.6 gallon flush then we will use this toilet in the existing bath too and have all Water Sense dual flush toilets which is recommended in the LEED water use category.
Interestingly, the water saving shower head I purchased for our existing bathroom is also a Niagara product. It is the TriMax shower head that has an adjustable .5/1/1.5 spray that is air assisted too. The 1 gallon spray we use most often and it has a wide spiral pattern that wets efficiently. Sometimes I use 1.5 just to warm up for a minute when I first get in the shower and I dial down to .5 to keep the water flowing while I shampoo or shave. It works great.
TriMax Showerhead