I’ve been shopping around for stuff for my two bathroom remodels (demolition on the master bath starts tomorrow!). I found a good online community at GardenWeb. The people there absolutely rave about the Toto Drake toilet. Early 1.6 gallon per flush toilets had some serious problems with clogging, self-cleaning, and needing multiple flushes. From there someone posted a site where a guy rates low-flow toilets and ranked the Drake at the top even though you can spend a lot more. The remaining question is whether I want to spend $312 for the higher ADA-compliant model or $234 for the conventional height seat. I am going to see if my GC can get these installed. Maybe I’ll spring for an ADA one in the main bathroom.
There are dates imprinted in the plaster underneath the toilet tank lid. The dates on my old toilets were OCT 18 1951 and NOV 13 1951. Mom said I got my money’s worth out of them.
I met Stanley at the house this morning and he already had just about everything out by the time I left for work. He said it wouldn’t be a problem installing the Drakes and he had an account with the store that sells them locally. He highly recommended the ADA compliant one (called “comfort height”) and said in one house where he had to replace a broken toilet he used a high one. A couple of weeks later they asked him to replace the other five (functioning) toilets in the house with high ones too, just because they liked that one so much. A regular toilet bowl is only 14.625 inches high. I measured a chair and it was 18 inches. So the extra two inches makes sense. Not so great for people with short legs though.
I found another place that rates toilets. It rates them purely on flushing ability by throwing in yellowish-brown logs of soybean paste (at least that’s what they say they are) and rating the toilets by the grams they can flush. That doesn’t mean they’re reliable, quiet, or anything else, but they do rate a lot of toilets.
Link
That article makes me think that while you can certainly make some bad choices, there are also quite a few good choices at a variety of price levels.