Big City Small Footprints

I’ve never been quite so excited about a toilet before. Well, maybe that time my running team was coming back from Hastings with a case of beer and the toilet on the train wasn’t working. This is something completely different though. Today, I took delivery of 2 wonderful low water toilets. These days we see dual flush toilets everywhere, so it might seem surprising that I’d be so excited by a toilet - but really, not all low flush toilets are the same!

We bought 2 Ifo Cera ES4 toilets from the Green Building Store. 1 is a wall hung version, the other is a back to wall, and both have a Thomas Dudley concealed cistern with a dual-flush ready siphon. The toilet has a full flush at 4.5 litres, and a short flush of 2. Aside from the incredibly low water usage (compared to normal valve toilets operating on 6/3 litres), the toilet is based on a siphon flush. So? (I can hear you saying).

If you go to the Green Building Store page on the ES4, there’s a short video at the bottom of the page extolling the virtues of the siphon over the valve (http://www.greenbuildingstore.co.uk/es4-advantages.php). Most older toilets are likely to be siphons, whilst modern toilets are almost all valves. Where we’re staying (during our house refurb) is a new-build house, and the dual flush toilet has exactly one of the problems described - the valve doesn’t shut off correctly, so the tank keeps filling up and leaking into the pan. So if we don’t pay attention, there’s a huge amount of water that could be wasted. Siphons just don’t do that - you have to ‘pump’ the water into the pan, so if it doesn’t work properly, you just have to push a bit harder. The guys who developed the ES4 (combining the Swedish pan with the UK cistern) are called Solution Elements, and you can find out more about valves and siphons on their page (interesting discussion here).

Anyway, I’m excited. The Green Building Store were fantastic help, and the service was brilliant (I even got my builder to confirm a bunch of stuff with them). All I need to do is install them and test them out - I hope they live up to the hype.