Meet Me In The Bathroom

I'm getting almost desperate enough to look for a black-market toilet. You know, the kind that flush with 3.5 gallons of water instead of the environmentally-friendly but frequently-ineffective 1.6 gallons. I've been fighting the problem of stopped-up toilets for several years now. The guys in this family are big, their appetites are big, and... well, everything else is big. 'Nuff said. The last time we remodeled the bathroom I had the carpeting taken out, and put ceramic tile down instead. That reduced the work I had to do when the toilet would run over -- but it's still treating the symptom instead of the disease. I wish I could just install a toilet that wouldn't get stopped up.

I remember back in the early 1970s, when we still had the old style toilets, some people were putting a brick in the tank to make it use less water. My cousin came home from college with her environmental consciousness raised and put a brick in the potty at my aunt and uncle's. My uncle got tired of having to flush multiple times, so he took the brick out as soon as she went back to school, and they only had it in there when she was home.

Are there figures on how much water we've saved since the law banning the Big Flush went into effect? I'd like to see those figures. If people are using multiple small flushes instead of a single big flush, I would think it would be a wash. (Hee.)

I've read that in other countries they have toilets with two levels of flush: a small amount of water for liquid waste, and more for solids. I believe you control this by turning the handle different directions. This looks like a very sensible solution to the problem, but one that's not available here because the larger flush would violate the water conservation law. I wonder how hard it would be to get one anyway.