If you manage apartments, hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, or any other business where people use toilets, clogged toilets are an expensive, messy nuisance. Every time you or someone on your team has to unclog a toilet, that’s unproductive time that could be better spent elsewhere. What’s more, 86 percent of Americans say a clogged public restroom toilet negatively impacts their perception of a business.
And it’s not like a clogged toilet only happens every so often. Every month, 27 percent of Americans—people who live in apartments, stay in hotels, and dine in restaurants—claim to experience at least one toilet clog.
When every clogged toilet hurts your productivity and your public perception, shouldn’t you consider an alternative to ordinary toilets that just keep clogging?
Pressure-assisted toilets can be just the alternative you need.
How Does a Pressure-assisted Toilet Work?
Most ordinary toilets use gravity to flush their contents. When a flush is triggered, the water in the tank essentially just falls into the bowl, with the force of the falling water creating a siphon effect that pulls the bowl’s contents down the drainpipe.
Except when it doesn’t—and then you get a clog.
A pressure-assisted toilet—also known as a power flush toilet—contains a sealed pressure tank that houses air and water. The vessel traps air, and as it fills with water, it uses the water supply line pressure to compress the trapped air inside. When a flush is triggered, this compressed air forces the water into the bowl, so instead of the “pulling” or siphon action of an ordinary toilet, the pressure-assist unit “pushes” waste out.
How much extra force does the pressure-assist unit generate? Pressure-assisted systems can reach up to 70-gallon-per-minute peak flow rate. This flushing force can improve drainline carry—the distance a flush propels waste matter through a drainpipe under test conditions. The best gravity toilets meet the American National Standards Institute recommendation of 40 feet, but pressure-assisted toilets deliver up to 60 feet of carry—a 50 percent advantage.
That extra force is how toilets equipped with pressurized systems maximize water delivery force to clean the bowl with a single flush. It’s also why a pressure-assisted toilet is far less likely to clog. Things that clog gravity toilets simply get forced down the drainpipe by a power flush toilet.
Power Flush Toilets Deliver Water Savings and More
Pressure-assisted toilets are awesome for avoiding clogs—and all the maintenance calls they require—but that’s just the first of many benefits they offer.
The next major benefit is water savings. Pressure-assisted toilets are effective using as little as 1 gallon per flush (gpf), while gravity toilets often use 1.6 gpf or more in older models. Pressure-assisted toilets are also less likely to need double-flushing, because waste is pushed out on the first flush.
The water savings can be significant—one 356-apartment complex in Baltimore reported a 57% average drop in daily water usage and a 46% average reduction in water costs.
(Incidentally, the manager of those Baltimore apartments estimated that the combined savings from lower water usage and reduced maintenance calls would deliver an ROI of less than 24 months from installation.)
Another benefit to pressure-assisted toilets is that they have fewer moving parts, and most of the serviceable parts are easy to replace.
One final benefit: The extra power of each flush may help keep toilet bowls looking cleaner, so people are less likely to get a negative impression from their restroom visits.
Flushmate® is the Preferred Choice of Installers and Users
Pressure-assisted toilets make sense in almost any commercial setting. (They’re getting increasingly popular for new home construction, too.) And the more toilets you manage, the more sense they make.
If you’d like to know more, you should know that Flushmate is the preferred choice of installers and users around the world when it comes to pressure-assisted toilets. Some of the biggest names in the toilet industry, such as Sloan®, Gerber®, Kohler®, and others, rely on Flushmate technologies.
Make a pressure-assist toilet with the Flushmate system part of your next toilet install, and you may never have to deal with the messy, expensive nuisance of clogged toilets again.
Are pressure-assisted toilets right for your next apartment complex, hotel, restaurant, or other public venue? Talk to the experts at Flushmate!