I was unable to find any reasonably priced vacuum assist toilets when I was facing this same problem. Consumer reports seems to agree and doesn’t even test them (Best Toilet Buying Guide - Consumer Reports).
Marketing BS or not, I had great success with an American Standard Champion 4, which is an inexpensive regular gravity-fed model. I went from having to unclog the old one once a month, to being clog free for several years now. It has seriously never clogged. The 2 3/8" glazed trapway doesn’t sound like a big improvement diameter-wise but it was enough to make a difference in my case.
It’s one of the top performers in the Consumer Reports testing, but you’ll need to subscribe to see more details.
They did a few years ago when I used their recommendation, in part, to buy a pair. Had excellent results with them in an ahem difficult household.
As for marketing BS, walk down the line of thrones at HD or Lowe’s and find one that DOESN’T claim super-flushing capabilities, even the $100 rental-class ones.
My father has this problem, due to some medical issues he has. First, my SO and I put in a US made toilet, one advertised to let you flush buckets of golf balls, followed by a bowling ball. It didn’t do the trick. The good news, we now own a truly impressive toilet snake.
Then we got one of the Caroma toilets. Like Gus Gusterson says, it’s got a 4" trapway instead of a 2". After 6 months of use, there were no clogging problems. It is a bit pricey, and Caroma was rather hard to work with (they are in Australia and didn’t seem to like answering correspondences from the store we were using) but all of that has been well worth it, to know that my mother is no longer fishing things out of the toilet.
Um. How to put this… When I was maybe ten, I had a huge plastic bowie knife as part of a Halloween costume. In my teens, I could clog a main sewer line. The not-quite-a-toy knife lived where it could do… doo-doo machete duty.
Preach it. We bought a Jameco toilet from HD and had to unclog the thing on a weekly basis. Later we found an industry review of toilets and discovered that we’d purchased the single worst-performing toilet they tested.
We replaced it with a Kohler Wellworth and have had only one clog in a couple of years. Might give one of those a try, since it’s cheaper and easier to find and install than some of the other options suggested (although I wouldn’t mind testing one of those flush-it-with fire models for the novelty).
Honestly, I don’t know why you put up with crappy solutions to pooh removal in the US. I often see people write about clogging problems and invariably they are in the US. I have never had a toilet clog on me. Use a decent size drain and all your problems flush away completely clogless. I have a Caroma bowl with dual flush and a small deposit can be flushed with the half flush option with no worries about clogging.
Then again, if you must use low water usage models it may not meet requirements. I think the half flush is 6 litres and the whole one is 11 litres. (Obviously not exactly half). So that’s 6/3.78 = 1.6 gals or 11/3.78 = 2.9 US gallons.
When I lived in the land of unreliable plumbing, we just kept a piece of straight wire (I think I used an unbent coat hanger) near the plunger for those situations. Kind of gross, but it beats a pricey remodel.
