# Banned toilets and shower heads. Why? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 11, 2004, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065 "2004-09-11T20:02:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ParentalAdvisory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/1 "2004-09-11T20:02:23Z")
If everyone all the sudden got their 5 gallon toilets and high flow shower heads, what would happen? Will the citys water supply go down, or run out of pressure? ---
**Author:** ![MaryEFoo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@MaryEFoo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaryEFoo)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/2 "2004-09-11T20:50:56Z")
They might, depending on what % those measures were saving, and what % of leeway there was in the existing supply. No doubt someone more knowledgable will come along with actual facts. The utility would then have to seek more resources, spend more money, take more water from rural districts, deal with the politics, etc. Or ration in some way. ---
**Author:** ![AskNott](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asknott/32/5790_2.png) [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/3 "2004-09-11T21:34:53Z")
This is one of those “restrict everybody to benefit a few” measures. Very few areas in the US have water shortages, but some places do. In Phoenix, I’m told, the water police will come talk to you if your sprinkler laps over into the street or if you wash your car when it’s not your day. Florida’s water supply is finite, but the population grows daily. The experts bicker over how soon Florida will run short of water. They all agree it will happen. Southern California has had more drought years than wet years for a long time. Even though it imports water from great distances, it isn’t enough. In my hometown in central Indiana, you can sink a well anywhere and get good clean water. We’d be hard pressed to run short of water, but the only toilets we can buy are the lowflow ones. When I bought showerheads, I popped out the restrictor washers. 😛 When I had my bathrooms rebuilt, I kept the old toilets. To get back to the Original Question, if everybody would sneak out to Canada to buy real toilets, a few isolated places would suffer. ---
**Author:** ![DougC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7feea3/32.png) [@DougC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DougC)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/4 "2004-09-11T21:52:09Z")
- - - The last time I got new faucets, one of the things I did on the first day after they were installed was take them apart and defeat the water-limiters. It used to be that there was just a metal washer somewhere along the way with a little hole in its center, but the last time the limiter was “integrated” intp a plastic seal/fitting, so if you just took the whole thing out, it would leak or spray water from the threads. So I had to take a drill and put a few 1/8" holes right through the center of the platic fitting. - As to WHY you should “save water” by doing this, well, umm, _it’s rather questionable_, quite frankly. In other locales there might be an actual, truew shortage of potable drinking water, but in teh US there is not. If you consider the entire situation, you begin to see how ridiculous it is–to require residential users to use water-saving faucets to save water, instead of _just raising the price of water_—but you see—if the gov’t allowed raising the price of water, then the users who would be most impacted are NOT residential customers, but **industrial and agricultural users** , who (in many areas) consume far more than residential use. But _they_ don’t want to pay those higher prices, you see. And so it goes. ~ ---
**Author:** ![MaryEFoo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@MaryEFoo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaryEFoo)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/5 "2004-09-11T22:04:18Z")
In my post, “ration in some way” would include the price-rationing possibility. Tell the one-time farmers in the Owens Valley that there is no shortage of water in the US. There would be a lot of other people, too, who whould differ with that statement. The consumers of industrial products and agricultural products don’t want to pay higher prices, either, for some reason. ---
**Author:** ![ParentalAdvisory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/6 "2004-09-11T22:11:39Z")
> [@AskNott](#): > > This is one of those “restrict everybody to benefit a few” measures. That’s what I was thinking. If Arizona needs to do it because they are actually short on water supplies fine. But Chicago? Next to Lake Michigan? It’s not like everyone is going to be flushing at the same time. And is saving 2 gallons a minute really saving anything? ---
**Author:** ![Dag\_Otto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/439d5e/32.png) [@Dag\_Otto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dag_Otto)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/7 "2004-09-11T22:15:10Z")
In some areas of the country, water is a scarce resource. Maybe not exactly shortages, but it’s something that should be conserved. Sure, Illinois has those great big lakes nearby, but if you lived in the Owens Valley and had Los Angeles eyeing your water, you might feel differently. Anyway, half the time you flush a toilet you’re flushing liquids, not solids. You don’t need a 5 gallon flush for that. So lower gallons per flush toilets were required. Granted, at first they did a, er, crappy job, but even then all you had to do was flush twice. Today, most toilets can do a great job with 1.6 gpf, all it took was a market that prompted the development of better designs. If you have an older low flow toilet, get rid of it and put in a newer design. In europe, I’ve seen toilets that could either do a small flush or a large flush, depending on the task at hand. I’ve never seen them in the US though. ---
**Author:** ![InternetLegend](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/internetlegend/32/13154_2.png) [@InternetLegend](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/InternetLegend)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/8 "2004-09-11T22:19:40Z")
There’s also the question of how much volume is running through a city’s sewer system (in those places that have them). All wastewater must be treated, and if there’s more water running through the system, that’s going to cost more. Also, in most areas, water has to be treated before it’s piped into houses, regardless of whether it’s used for drinking or for flushing. I live in an area where it’s practically a crime (and in some cases IS a crime) to waste water. Although people in the Midwest may think they’re immune to these concerns, the supply of clean, potable water is becoming a concern in more and more regions. In Albuquerque thirty years ago, engineers were telling us that we had a “limitless” supply of water in the aquifers under the city. Nowadays, we’ve discovered that the aquifer is smaller than once thought and that not all the water is usable. It makes sense to get into the habit of conservation before you discover you have a shortage. ---
**Author:** ![danceswithcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9e8a1a/32.png) [@danceswithcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/danceswithcats)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/9 "2004-09-11T22:27:51Z")
I have a question for the OP-why use more of a resource than is necessary? If you have municipal water, you probably pay for gallons of water consumed and that calculation also applies to your sewer bill. By installing energy efficient fixtures in my former home, I reduced my bill to the minimum per quarter and never ran out of hot water. If you have a well and site septic disposal, you’re doing your own tiny portion of the environment a favor, too. With restricted flow faucets and showerhead, and a low-flow toilet, I take less water out of the ground, and put less into the waste field for treatment. A family of four each saves a gallon per flush at three flushes per day with a low flow toilet. Add another two gallons per person saved with restricted flow showerheads, and another gallon or two for the entire family with low flow faucets, and the family has filled an MC306 tank trailer like the ones you see delivering gasoline, with 8500 gallons of water that they didn’t use in the course of a year. Waste is selfish and foolish. Period. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/10 "2004-09-11T22:29:30Z")
Well, do the math. There’s probably at least one toilet for each person in the country, including those in businesses. Assume an average of 1000 flushes per toilet per year, for a nice round number. Now assume just a two gallon difference in toilet size. That’s 600,000,000,000 gallons of fresh water saved - and also not flushed into the sewer system - each year. An olympic-sized pool has a million gallons. 600,000 pools. That’s a lot of water saved. ---
**Author:** ![danceswithcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9e8a1a/32.png) [@danceswithcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/danceswithcats)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/11 "2004-09-11T22:34:57Z")
> [@Dag Otto](#): > > In europe, I’ve seen toilets that could either do a small flush or a large flush, depending on the task at hand. I’ve never seen them in the US though. Kohler produced a twin handle toilet ~10 years ago but the design didn’t catch on. I bought one because of moving to a house with well and septic tank. It uses 1.6 for a solids flush and 1.1 for a liquid flush. Most of the time, the 1.1 handles solids anyway. ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/12 "2004-09-11T22:41:55Z")
Reminiscence from a school visit… We went to the local sewage treatment plant. As you can imagine, it was a way to create interest in biology that couldn’t be acheived in the classroom. Anyway, we watched the genuine incoming ‘product’. For the most part, it wasn’t even coloured. It looked like clean water. The guys showing us around explained that the only reason it looks like that is because people don’t like to think about or look at their own crap, they’d rather dump several kilos of water onto it. But seeing the vast amount of expensively-treated water being wasted in that way was thoguht-provoking. ---
**Author:** ![ParentalAdvisory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/13 "2004-09-11T22:42:29Z")
> [@danceswithcats](#): > > I have a question for the OP-why use more of a resource than is necessary? Maybe those lo-flow shower heads work for you, but I find them to be quite horrible. I’ll pay for the extra 2 gallons a minute. I also find it easier to flush once and get the job done, rather than flushing 2 or 3 times to get it done. Those 2 or 3 flushes with an efficient toiliet are equal to one good quality flush of a toilet of high capacity. > [@danceswithcats](#): > > Waste is selfish and foolish. Period. Wasting… water? I have nothing against limiting water in areas where it’s scarce. I should’ve stated the Chicago area in my post. ---
**Author:** ![chorpler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chorpler/32/2888_2.png) [@chorpler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chorpler)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2004, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/14 "2004-09-12T02:35:36Z")
> [@Dag Otto](#): > > In europe, I’ve seen toilets that could either do a small flush or a large flush, depending on the task at hand. I’ve never seen them in the US though. The last apartment I moved into had a toilet where you would twist the flush-handle clockwise (“up” on the label) for a small flush and counterclockwise (“down,” the way all my other toilets have flushed) for a big flush. Here in Las Vegas, they run commercials urging people to rat out their neighbors for wasting water. Seems pretty 1984-esque, but the way I’ve seen some sprinklers set, putting 90% of the water on the street and 10% on the grass, I can understand. Heck, back when we lived in a house, I tried to do my part by not watering my lawn at all. But the stupid city threatened to fine me because all the dead grass was a “fire hazard” or some such nonsense. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![danceswithcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9e8a1a/32.png) [@danceswithcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/danceswithcats)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2004, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/15 "2004-09-12T03:13:16Z")
> [@ParentalAdvisory](#): > > Wasting… water? I have nothing against limiting water in areas where it’s scarce. I should’ve stated the Chicago area in my post. Using your logic, if I were building a factory in northern Montana where the sky is bright and clear, I should be able to spew toxins into the atmosphere. Didn’t your Momma teach you ‘_waste not, want not_?’ Don’t take it the wrong way-I’m not a tree hugger. It’s just like I said before: waste is selfish and foolish. Period. ---
**Author:** ![ParentalAdvisory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2004, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/16 "2004-09-12T03:20:26Z")
I see what you’re saying, but using your logic, we shouldn’t dig large foundations for buildings. It’s a waste of dirt you see. Around these parts, water is a very readily available resource, I see no need to limit it’s usage. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2004, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/17 "2004-09-12T03:24:28Z")
> [@danceswithcats](#): > > A family of four each saves a gallon per flush at three flushes per day with a low flow toilet. Add another two gallons per person saved with restricted flow showerheads, and another gallon or two for the entire family with low flow faucets, and the family has filled an MC306 tank trailer like the ones you see delivering gasoline, with 8500 gallons of water that they didn’t use in the course of a year. > > Waste is selfish and foolish. Period. Except that you could save the same 8500 gallons by just eating [3.5 pounds less beef each year](http://www.skidmore.edu/~jthomas/lifestyleproject/btuusagecharts.html). The amount of water used by households pales so insignficantly to industrial production that these minor conservation measures really do nothing apart from make the conserver feel superior. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2004, 3:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/18 "2004-09-12T03:54:23Z")
> [@Exapno Mapcase](#): > > Well, do the math. > > There’s probably at least one toilet for each person in the country, including those in businesses. Assume an average of 1000 flushes per toilet per year, for a nice round number. Now assume just a two gallon difference in toilet size. > > That’s 600,000,000,000 gallons of fresh water saved - and also not flushed into the sewer system - each year. > > An olympic-sized pool has a million gallons. > > 600,000 pools. That’s a lot of water saved. You do realize that this calculation is a load of crap, right? It falls down because you assume a one-to-one ratio of flushes between low-flows and the older models. Anyone who has used the new toilets can tell you that a three- or four-to-one ratio on soild waste could be more accurate, depending on the person and the toilet. I’m not bashing your intentions, but your calculations are too simple. You’ll need to give me evidence to back up the claim that low-flows actually reduce net water consumption. ---
**Author:** ![gazpacho](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6f9a4e/32.png) [@gazpacho](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gazpacho)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2004, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/19 "2004-09-12T04:42:53Z")
> [@](#): > > It falls down because you assume a one-to-one ratio of flushes between low-flows and the older models. Anyone who has used the new toilets can tell you that a three- or four-to-one ratio on soild waste could be more accurate, depending on the person and the toilet. Oh please. We have low flow toilets in our house and 2 flushes are never needed. Our neighbors have these toilets and one flush does it. My parents have said commodes and strangely enough one flush works . My sister, my fiends etc. ---
**Author:** ![TimeWinder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bcef8e/32.png) [@TimeWinder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimeWinder)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2004, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065/20 "2004-09-12T17:02:52Z")
> [@Exapno Mapcase](#): > > That’s 600,000,000,000 gallons of fresh water saved - and also not flushed into the sewer system - each year. While I agree with the “why waste it just because it’s there” crowd, this debate always raises a thought with me. And since y’all’re reading this, you get to share in my dubious mental hiccup: Water cannot be “wasted.” For all practical purposes, water cannot be destroyed. Heck, it’s hard to even contaminate it to the point where it can’t be straightforwardly (not necessarily inexpensively) purified. When people talk about a “water shortage,” they don’t mean there’s a shortage of water - the planet’s covered in it, and the system is (ignoring the occasional nuclear reaction or loss to space) closed - use as much as you want; it still returns to the system. What a “water shortage” means is that there’s a localized lack of water in sufficient quantity, quality, or price for a desired task. A water shortage is really a shortage of purification, access, or transportation resources. I think that we should be phrasing the problem in this manner; it’s far more conducive to actually solving the problem. Conservation isn’t going to work in the long run. And perhaps there’s something to the argument that if you live in a place where the system can produce usable water faster than it’s consumed, and are willing to live with the costs involved in the human-controlled parts of that cycle, that conservation isn’t necessary at all. But the statement that “we’re running out of water,” in the sense that we may be running out of fossil fuels, was beaten into me as a child, and is still used as a shorthand in many news articles on the subject. And the statement is flat-out wrong. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/banned-toilets-and-shower-heads-why/264065.md?page=2)