To You, this Toilet may Look like a Very Ordinary Toilet, but I can Assure You that it is Not the Case!
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
This sentence, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is known as the "mousetrap fallacy": building a better product is not enough to be successful; if there are no effort to make your product known to its potential customers, you will not succeed.
In October 2016, my wife sold her 3 bedroom house and we moved to a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom rental apartment that had just been renovated.
As expected for a rental, nothing was top of the line, except maybe the toilets.
Let's take a look closer:
One surprising thing on this toilet is that it is not, like most modern toilets, a dual-flush. How come?
The name of the company is "Hennessy & Hinchcliffe". I tried to find a website for this company, but was not successful.
The few tidbits that I was able to find was an address in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada and two names: Jerrad Hennessy and Mark Hinchcliffe. On manta.com, it is indicated that the company was established in 2007 and that it has 5 employees.
I also found that the toilet was distributed by a company called Water Matrix.
Under the company name on the toilet, there is another line. Let's take an even closer look:
0.8 gpf (3.0 Lpf)
"gpf" means "gallons per flush" and "Lpf" means "litres per flush".
Note: like most civilized persons, I will use the SI accepted metric system unit "litre", with this spelling (and not "liter").
Many dual flush toilets on the market use 4.0 Lpf for liquid "product" and 6.0 Lpf for solid "product".
Some toilets use only 4.8 Lpf.
This toilet uses only 3.0 litres per flush, for both liquid and solid "products".
If you are interested by high-efficiency toilets, you should read this article:
A new test method provided a big push. Introduced in 2002, the Maximum Performance (MaP) Test used simulated human waste made from a soybean mixture that duplicated real world conditions, unlike previous tests.
Preparing for a MaP test
source
There are now toilets that are able to flush 1,000 grams of solid waste with only 4.8 litre flushes.
The only widely available three-litre toilets on the market are the Proficiency line from Hennessey & Hinchcliffe in Mississauga, Ont. Launched in 2009, all models flush 800 grams in MaP testing.
It uses a unique passive air pressurized trap-way that starts an immediate siphon without depending on water entering the bowl.
“Three litres of water are effectively used to clean and scour the bowl since our tests have shown that the vacuum created by our BSB flush system alone will flush the toilet contents without any additional water,” said [Jerrad] Hennessy.
So, here we are, with a very high efficiency toilet, that has been commercialized for 8 years and that I had never heard about.
Indeed, this toilet is a "better mouse trap!
