Choosing the best toilet for your family is more than finding a colour and price and taking it home from the nearest store – these are a few considerations you should keep in mind.
We built our house in 2005 and had agreed on a few upgrades for our dream home, but toilets were not even remotely in the running as items we were going to spend time researching or allocating additional funds to. Builder’s grade bowls seemed adequate, and really, any time and effort spent on a toilet should be in filling it right? (Gross! Lol)
A LOT.
Like every second day Hubby or I (mainly Hubby) were battling the drain for who was going to live with the most recent deposit.
As it turns out, we weren’t the only family in the neighbourhood with drain-pain. It seems weird that I know this much about my neighbours, but in a humourous venting session over drinks, it came up that others were wishing they’d spent a bit of time and a few more dimes to save themselves the daily/weekly drudgery of poop-duty.
After a particularly strenuous week, I decided it was time to do a bit of research on choosing the best toilet for my family.
Choosing the best toilet for your family
Flushing power; this is the reason we were replacing toilets to begin with, so I wanted to make sure that our new thrones would really do a royal flush.
Water consumption; this may seem contrary to our first requirement, but clogged toilets are not necessarily a function of how much water is in the bowl. Newer toilets are able to flush using only 1 – 1.6 gallons of water per flush (compared to 3.5 gpf in older toilets) but because of “hydraulic innovations” these lower gpf toilets are able to flush with equal, and sometimes even more, pressure to drown the brown. Hey, if it goes down and I can have less of an impact on the environment then I’m in!
Trapway / Flush valve; it isn’t small turds that cause big clogs so why would anyone choose a narrow drain (aka. siphonic trapway)? Try stuffing a cupcake through a toilet paper tube and see how well that works out.
Measure; This might not be obvious, but not all toilets have the same dimensions. The toilets we chose for the rest of the house would not fit in our powder room. All of the builder’s grade toilets looked exactly the same, but the spacing between the wall and the drain was narrower in our powder room.
Reviews; You’ve heard the saying “Opinions are like assholes, we all have one and we all think others’ stink”. In this scenario, we want those stinky reviews. Consumer Reports is one of my favourite resources for testing results, but it is people who write reviews on Amazon or home improvement store sites that have actually put their money where their mouth butt is. See what they have to say before making your purchasing decision.
Certainly you can take into account design, colour, height, one-piece versus two-piece, features like ‘self cleaning’ etc. – the above list is just the beginning of the many considerations involved in choosing the best toilet for your family, but they are the top 5 in my books.
So, with all of this in mind, I found the best toilet for our family.
*This post is sponsored by American Standard Canada. I approached American Standard Canada after completing my research and they provided me with product to test and review for you. As always, my opinions are sincere and my own.
Champion® Pro Right Height® Elongated Toilet
Description
- Low consumption (6.0Lpf/1.6 gpf)
- PowerWash® rim scrubs bowl with each flush
- EverClean™ Surface
- 4″ piston-action Accelerator™ flush valve
- 2-3/8″ fully-glazed trapway
- 12″ (305mm) rough-in
- 10 Year Warranty
I installed our Champion® Pro Right Height® Elongated Toilet about 4 months ago, so my testing was thorough and prolonged and I can tell you without an ounce of exaggeration that we went from having to unclog our builder’s grade toilet every other day (yes, we need more fibre) to less than once per month. Yup, only three plunge-worthy events in four months.
SPECTACULAR! Truly – if you have to unclog your toilet with any kind of regularity, you know what a shitty job it is.
Installation was really easy and took less than an hour (and I did it myself!)
The Champion® Pro Right Height® Elongated Toilet comes with a 2 3/8″ fully glazed trapway – that’s the pipe inside the toilet that the poop slides down – glazed seems obvious to me, but our old toilet wasn’t. What do you think happens if you rub fudge along a nail file? I think you see where I’m going. The 2 3/8″ is also the largest trapway on the market right now. Big poop requires a big shoot.
I’ll give you a little tip I learned along the way; after your Champion® Pro Right Height® Elongated Toilet is installed, leave a thin strip of toilet paper behind the bowl and under the water pipe for a day or two. Any drips that might happen will show very quickly and you’ll be able to tighten bolts or valves before any damage is done.
The EverClean™ surface on the Champion® Pro Right Height® Elongated Toilet is a glass-like coating that makes it both easier to clean and more difficult to dirty.
What is the best flushing toilet on the market?
The 4″ piston-action accelerator flush valve means that the toilet releases water over the entire interior of the bowl in less than a second. Chunks and splatter are whisked away in a flush – clean and mean. American Standard currently has some of the best flushing toilets on the market right now (2018) at a price point that we (consumers) can afford.
The Champion will move a mass almost 70 percent larger than the industry standard. It achieves the highest MaP bulk removal rating–1,000 grams–and will even flush a bucket of golf balls! ~American Standard ProSite
Obviously I would never recommend trying the “golf ball” test, but it is sort of ‘nice-to-know’ should Barbie get a bath or those MatchBox cars need a wash.
We decided to go with the “Right Height®” Champion® Pro Elongated Toilet – which has been designed to be ergonomically correct and to reduce undue stress on the body. Hey, Elvis died on his throne and I’m not getting any younger! Seriously though, Hubby and I are tall and our girls are growing like weeds, so we felt that getting the ‘proper’ height would be important going forward.
We ended up replacing three toilets with the Champion® Pro and can’t be more pleased with our decision to upgrade. Going to the bathroom is no longer an embarrassment for the pooper and certainly isn’t a disgusting chore afterwards. Hands-down the best toilet we’ve ever had.
If you’re tired of plunging to drown the brown then the Champion® Pro Right Height® Elongated Toilet is the way to go.
Get it?
Way to “go”.
*Note: I know this article is written with a lot of “potty humour”, but we’re all adults here, dealing with the same ‘taboo’ subject – I figured if you can’t bring in potty humour when writing about a potty, when can you?
Have a great one!
(See, I did it again! lol)
Whatever you call it, the bathroom toilet is one of the most important items in your house. While the color and cost matter, how much water it uses and how well it flushes matter more.