I think I still have the 13 L (3.4 G) flush toilet, or even larger. It's pretty easy to use inexpensive hardware to save water to 6 L or less (<1 .6="" a="" almost="" and="" br="" can="" don="" dual-flush="" easy="" flush.="" for="" g="" have="" i="" it="" lot="" man="" more="" nothing.="" per="" poor="" pretty="" s="" save="" t="" than="" think="" this="" to="" water="" you="">
If you have the post-1994 6 L low flow toilets, the first generations don't even flush well for the full volume. What can you achieve by halving the volume?
There's another complication during tank refill. The bowl is also refilled via the overflow tube (the tube in the middle of the tank). The water at the level of the bowl will depend on the volume of the last flush, which dictates the refill time and hence the refilled volume. This may not occur if your fill valve is way over refilling the bowl, or you use those kits that come with it's fill valve too.
You can do tests before deciding to convert. The motivation is that you need to empty your tank for installing anything. It can be messy depending on what is deposited and accumulated in your tank.
Before you test, you have to understand that there are at least 3 levels of flush. The least volume required is flush for pure liquid. The next I will call it paper flush, for paper plus liquid. The most volume required is solid flush. You can also add floater flush, 3-day-after flush, you know what I mean.
It happened that all my toilets have an adjustable flapper already in it, the sort with a scaled dial to vary the volume. It cost a tiny bit more than the cheapest flapper. First you adjust the fill valve to increase the volume in the tank to the maximum level, leaving a safe margin (~1 inch?) below the overflow tube. Then you test by adjusting the flapper to get the desired flush. If you do not have an adjustable flapper, you can just keep the flapper open by hand and measure the water levels at the tank.
I found out that for my old toilet, 4 to 6 L is required for all the 3 different flushes. That means you do not gain anything if you have already a low flow toilet. If you have a high efficient low flow, you may still flush a lot of things by reducing the volume.
Let me say it this way, if you add food dye at the bowl, the amount of water you need to flush depends on how much dye you use. So you can't get away with much less than 5L of water all the time. Actually for pure liquid, you don't really need to flush. You can just add water at the bowl via the overflow tube, until the food dye disappears.
If the volume is enough to flush paper, you don't need much more water to flush solids.
So, if dual-flush is pretty useless, do I need a new $500 dual-flush toilet to really save water?
No. It dawned on me people do dual-flush all the time. By holding onto the flush handle, people empty the whole tank of water into the bowl to achieve a mega flush, when the normal flush fails.
So this is my ideal of a multi-flush system for almost nothing:
Firstly, there is the tube at the top of the tank, coming up from the back of the tank. This is just to push the fill valve open with a ring of tube, through the hole at the back of the tank, and refill the bowl via the overflow tube. You stop pushing when all the color of the food dye disappears. This is a bad 3-minute implementation but someone can improve on it.
The indicator is the main component of the multi-flush system, located at the corner of the tank, just below the flush handle. This is just a 1/4 standard fridge water tube, with the other end at the bottom of the tank.
You can see two mark at the tube indicator. The top mark is the level of the full tank. The bottom mark is the level when the flapper closes by itself. Currently this is about 5L, enough to flush paper and solids most of the time.
This is the normal or number 1 flush. Before the flapper closes (before the water level drops below the bottom mark), you hold on to the handle and let the water level drop some more, until you think it's enough. So you have multiple flush levels.
Having an old powerful toilet has its advantages above those poor low flow ones. If the number 1 flush fails, I still have up to 10 L of water in the tank to complete the task immediately, instead of having to wait for the tank to refill.
If this is a guest room toilet I don't recommend it at all. Here I would recommend a single 5 to 7 L flush, and tell all the family only to use this bathroom for solids only, but don't tell the guests.
If you have small kids that don't understand much, you can have a bathroom with 3-4 L for boys only, and a bathroom for girls with 5L for liquid and paper flush. If you really need to save the planet, you have to teach them that pale yellow is OK, and residue white paper in the bowl is OK.
The indicator is just a tube that runs over the back of the tank, below the lid, to the bottom of the tank. At the moment I tape the tube to the tank with packing tape. The L-bend quick connector you see is just to avoid curving the tube too much. At the beginning, you have to siphon out the air in the tube, using your mouth or a baby ear and nose pump.
ps Don't leave the tube for long without securing the end. If the end of the tube drops down, the tank will drain and the refill valve will open forever. This lead to another better idea.
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