Tonight I watched a cable channel about refitting ones house so that one uses less energy and I noticed that a solution that came up was to get rid of your old toilet and replace it with a low flow toilet. It seems to me that one can take a water bottle of an appropriate volume (one quart or one gallon) , fill it with water and put it in the water hold tank at the back of the toilet to displace said volume of water thus turning your toilet into a low (less) flow model without the waste of putting your old toilet in a landfill or the energy needed to transport it to another location for reuse. Any thoughts on this idea are welcome.
John
7/6/2008
Ok, me again. I left one comment but I figured I would continue the experiment in thought here. Ok, so, I put some Gatorade bottles in the holding tank and we have some issues with buoyancy. I believe the bottles move about a bit because they are not tall enough to support a significant mass of water above the refill line to keep the bottles stationary. This photo shows a most general working situation with a buoyant bottle becoming lodged in the flow hole (happened once with countless gallons lost) only once but that is bad enough. I figure that replacing the 3 right bottles with one plastic half gallon of water will solve this problem.
Then, I thought "mmmm, bricks?". I am taking a certain amount of water out of the cycle of nature and that water might be needed in some way beyond my mind. A brick allows that water to go on it's merry little way. But, a brick? Even if clean wont it have sediment gradually released from it? And what of the energy to make a brick? Is it more then the energy to make the bottle or clean the water to tap specs?
Well, I like my water bottle idea so I will continue with that for a while. Besides a brick I have not.
