Bringing Home the Half-Flush
The Perfect Flush interface, pretty self-explanatory.
Toilets use a tremendous amount of water. 40% of household indoor water is used for toilet flushing and we flush approximately 55 billion gallons of water each day. The numbers are pretty staggering, and ever since I saw my first dual-flush toilet many years ago in Europe, I’ve considered our standard one-flush toilets to be absurdly wasteful. When it comes to the old deuce, fine, flush flush flush away, but do we really need three gallons of water to flush down an innocent little pool of pee? Absolutely not. Unfortunately, despite being widely implemented in Europe, dual-flush toilets haven’t taken hold in the U.S., mainly due to a high price tag and the low price of water.
In my recent attempts at greenification, I’ve been combating my “flush guilt” by abiding by the old adage, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” However, even though I’m not at all squeamish (quite the opposite, actually), I’ve concluded that I find reusing the mellowing, yellowing, aging pool in my toilet pretty damn nasty, especially on those dehydrated weekend mornings.
However, thanks to Karl Burkart’s blog entry (check out Karl’s actual blog, too, a great site discussing the latest in green tech featured on the Mother Nature Network web page), I may have found my answer. Perfect Flush, an easy to install toilet gadget, turns any standard toilet into a dual-flush toilet, so we don’t have to let anything mellow and we can still save water whenever a full flush isn’t absolutely necessary. Perfect Flush will sell for about $120 and the makers claim water savings with Perfect Flush can reach $100 a year, which means break-even and, ultimately, savings can be achieved relatively quickly.
Unfortunately, it appears as if the product won’t be available until May of this year, which means, for at least another few months, I’ll be “letting it mellow”. You should, too.
