Toilet Hacking

by Toilet Fixer 555C

Most hacking is done on computers because that's where the technology is - we live in a digital age and so most technology has a chip in it somewhere.  But some things stubbornly refuse to be computerized.  Consider the lowly toilet.  Now, I'm aware that in Japan they have remarkable "smart" toilets which do... things.  I'm not that familiar with them but I'm very curious.  Anyway, the old-fashioned dumb (i.e., American) toilet moves something we like to call "waste" from our proximity into a collective depository where all the "waste" from the neighborhood can be mingled and purified (hopefully).  If that's not possible, it's hoped that the waste can be rendered harmless or, as a last resort, pumped so far away that it will become somebody else's problem.

To do this, we need water - lots of water, as any intelligent person who watches a toilet flush should be able to figure.  It's this water issue that creates some problems and presents some opportunities, which in and of themselves aren't evil but certainly attract a particular type of person with evil intent.

I'm not going to go into all of the legal and technical issues associated with the invention of the "low-flow toilet."  The animated television program King of the Hill had an episode (season 4, episode 22, "Flush with Power") that thoroughly outlined the challenges faced by anyone attempting to install and use a toilet designed to use less water.  The TV show even explained how crooked politicians and crooked industrialists can work together to make everybody miserable.  Unfortunately, the program did not go on to explain how to modify (hack) a low-flow toilet to get it to flush using more water.  It implied that one might wish to just install a "high-flow" toilet, but the problem is that those things are just not so easy to find and can be expensive and/or illegal.  And therein lies a tale...

My own personal journey to toilet outlawry began with the ceramic "tink" of an old, old toilet tank breaking cleanly in half due to my failing to comply with the instruction, printed clearly on the inside of the tank, warning me not to over-torque the nuts that hold the tank to the bowl.

But wait... before I go further, I think I'll briefly review toilet construction (this will apply to all known toilet types, keeping in mind that European toilets are vastly superior to American junk, and Japanese toilets are, apparently, using NASA technology, so they won't be mentioned here).  The tank is a big ceramic, uh, tank that sits on top.  The bowl is the thing you sit on.  The tank fills with water, and a float causes a float valve to close when it's "full."  Flushing opens another valve (the flapper valve), then all the water dumps into the bowl, and the laws of physics and basic rules of hydraulics cause the old, yucky water to be carried away into the pipe that goes to the sewer (or someplace) and new water replaces it.  It's pretty clever.

The power of the flush depends upon the amount of water that moves from tank to bowl.  This water is lost - it will not come back again except through rain that came from the ocean - I think you get the idea.  In places (like the southwestern United States) where there are drought conditions most of the time, it seems reasonable to try to minimize the amount of water lost through flushing.  If you live in a place with plenty of water, it's no problem.  But water is like air; it's not a big deal until you don't have any.  The issue of water management is very, very emotional wherever water is scarce - political, even.  Laws are passed.  Regulations are posted.  I'm hoping that the reader will see a glimmer illuminating the resemblance between this phenomenon and numerous other issues relating to high technology.  Water, in a way, is like bandwidth and government attempts to be "fair" in assigning ownership often end up assigning that ownership to whomever has the most influence with certain politicians.

One easy way to "spread the burden" of water conservation is to create a toilet that uses less water.  But an even easier way to do this is to create a toilet that appears to use less water, but actually does not (as was described in the King of the Hill episode mentioned above).  Furthermore, it's really easy to simply strike the problem "at the root" by telling the people who make toilets to build them so that they use less water, and the easiest way to do that is to adjust the float so that less water collects in the tank, so that less water moves through the toilet with each flush.

In other words, government is attempting to solve a problem, not in a direct, possibly disruptive and probably expensive way, but in a cheap, dirty, easy way that does not work.  This is where the hacking instinct begins to kick in - for some of us.  Something that has been deliberately broken in order to create a phony fix for a problem presents no moral dilemma to a hacker.  It needs to be "un-broken," period.  While many problems involving computers are just too darn complex for most people to be able to grasp easily, I don't think that this toilet thing is difficult to understand.  This is a good example of why hackers do work on somebody else's equipment, often using somebody else's tools, in somebody else's back yard.  It's simply a question of what takes priority; random lines drawn on a map, or the notion that "functional" is better than "broken?"

When my toilet tank broke, I went to the Giant Building Supply Store to get a replacement.  They had only one kind - low-flow.  They had cheap low-flow and expensive low-flow.  I have learned since then that special, power-flushing toilets do exist, but they have to be special ordered and installed, I assume, by a special technician from Japan.  The hell with that.

I bought the cheap low-flow tank, since the expensive ones were expensive only because they had fancy shapes and colors.  I took the tank home and installed it.  It wasn't hard.  You just plunk it on there and tighten (not too tight!) those pesky nuts.  That is when I began to really appreciate the creative genius that gives us programs like King of the Hill.  The toilet now acted in strange and unnatural ways.  It simply could not flush away the "waste" without requiring a second flush, and sometimes a third one.  The tank, for reasons that might be discovered on some government website, had the symbols "6 lpf" stenciled inside of it like an Egyptian tomb.  It means that this so-called "low-flow" toilet consumes 6 liters (1.6 gallons) of water per flush - which means that it consumes 12 liters (3.2 gallons) in two flushes and a 3-flush job will cost humanity the use of 18 liters (4.8 gallons) of water.

There is something spookily official about that stencil, and like all spooky, official stencils it pissed me off.

Here is where we get into the actual "hacking."  The problem with toilet hacking, you may be surprised to discover, is that there is a law prohibiting the alteration of low-flow toilets by plumbing professionals in order to allow them to consume more water.  I don't know for sure if such a regulation could be used against "a private individual," but it seems logical.  When I brought the low-flow tank home and mated it to a high-flow bowl, I may have invalidated my warranty right there and ran afoul of the government.  No, seriously.  If I didn't do any crime at that moment, then the question is what sort of thing did I do?  I surely violated the spirit of something-or-other and, I assure you, I wasn't about to stop there.  Show me any well informed adult who thinks that we will never see further toilet regulation in America and I'll show you an individual who has only limited experience with building codes and enforcement of those codes.

As the "end consumer" (so to speak), I am the last bastion of "freedom" in toilet modification, but that bastion is under assault just like any other bastion of freedom to do anything.  I honestly don't know what kind of legal lines I did cross or may have crossed in my attempt to get this toilet to work.  It's easy to say "none" but I don't know.  I've "worked with" government agencies and I don't trust them.  Sometimes, you can't know what a "violation" is until you do it.

I now had a poorly functioning toilet, even though I had "repaired" it.  It not only failed to flush properly, it also required me to hold down the flush handle while it flushed.  This problem was partially solved by installing a self-closing replacement flapper valve that could be adjusted so that it allowed more water to pass.  The kind I used is made by a company called Fluidmaster - the Flusher Fixer Model 555C.  I also replaced the plastic flush handle with a metal one.  Now, you're probably thinking that it may have been cheaper to buy the power-flush toilet rather than modify this one.  Maybe so (I doubt it), but this is the same argument presented to all hackers, hot-rodders, and assorted hobbyists by various moms, girlfriends, wives, and big brothers throughout history, right?  So it's not a good argument.  It leaves out the part where I take my toilet destiny into my own two hands.

As I installed the Flusher Fixer flapper valve, I notice that it actually came with a system (using holes and plugs) that looked like something from the notebooks of Leonardo and was designed to allow you to adjust the amount of time the valve stays open.  Fantastic.  As any hacker can tell you, for every well-meaning idiocy there is a practical tool to kick its ass.  But even though I now had a flapper valve that would allow more water to pass and closed itself when needed, one (major) problem remained.  No matter how much I tweaked the flapper valve, and no matter how much I tweaked the float valve (the valve that fills the tank - the flapper valve empties it), there was a real, solid limit on how much water would flush through the bowl per flush.  This limit wasn't the size of the tank (thank God) but the height of an infernal "standpipe" that, uh, stood in the middle of the tank and simply drained away any water that entered the tank and rose above the top of the standpipe.  In other words a simple drain, placed at the "correct" height, making "over-filling" impossible.

For some.

The real trick here would be to figure a way to extend the height of that pipe.  I decided not to simply go shopping for a new pipe.  You might wonder why, but I suppose it's just my mechanic's instinct.  I guess I should disclose that I am an aircraft mechanic, among other things.  So I know that to take something apart, especially something involving a liquid, is to invite trouble.  Specifically, leakage.  You may scoff, but while you are scoffing at my hesitancy to simply swap out the component, any attempt to remove the funky old screws from the base of the standpipe will cause the tank to move, and that motion alone may start a leak near those blasted nuts - the same ones that broke the first tank and started us all down this road to toilet hackery.  So I'm going to make a good decision now and not mess with those screws.  Instead, I'm going to extend the height of the existing standpipe.  As a bonus, this will allow me to "undo" the work if the total weight of the water in the tank somehow causes leakage at those infernal nuts or some other problem.

My first effort at extending the standpipe involved using an epoxy putty (called "Mighty Putty"), which is labeled "waterproof" and is (supposedly) used for plumbing repair.  This didn't work at all, as the stuff is almost impossible to form into a tube shape by hand while awkwardly working inside a toilet tank.  After discarding the rapidly-hardening putty, I noticed that the plastic tube that had held the putty was about the same diameter as the standpipe.  I measured it and, begorra!, 'twas the same diameter.  Now the question was - "How to attach the tube to the standpipe and make it waterproof?"

Ah, yes.  Now, sometimes it is necessary not to give in to prejudice.  My natural dis-affinity for duct tape made me wary, but a new kind of duct tape - a high adhesion variety from the people who make Gorilla Glue (called Gorilla Tape) gave me hope that this whole thing could be done without putting too much stress on those flimsy nuts at the bottom of the tank.  Remember - I'm trying to avoid stressing those nuts and the surrounding seals (gaskets) and the surrounding porcelain.

Any foul ups and I could:

• Break the tank.
• Start a leak.
• Break the bolts that the nuts thread onto.

Any of these is an immediate "game over" - requiring a trip back to the Giant Building Supply Store.

I cut the plastic tube to the right length by "eyeball" measurement and carefully put one layer (with a quarter inch of overlap) of Gorilla Tape onto the "extension" and the standpipe, thereby joining them together with an outer "sleeve" of tape.  One quick flush-and-fill later, I found that I needed to adjust the fill valve (it's adjustable with a simple screwdriver, since this is one thing that can cause a toilet to "run" and will get complaints from end-users), then I inserted one of the plastic pins into the Flush Fixer 555C (the flapper valve) in order to delay its closing long enough for all the water to be flushed.  Once this was done, I not only had a tank that would fill with 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of water, it would flush all 10 liters.  Yeah baby.  I hope you won't be shocked if I mention that this number is still low compared to "world averages" for flushing!

A simple ten-second countdown and the first flush of a new high-flow age had begun.  My new and jazzy hot-rod toilet can now consume, on a good day, just about anything I usually put in a toilet - in one flush.  It won't flush away apples or pineapples or watermelons or anything that Thomas Crapper's original Victorian toilet could flush, but it's all right for now.  It also doesn't consume 20 liters per flush, as some very old systems did, nor does it consume 12 or 18 liters per "incident" as this very same toilet did before I modified it.  Please note that I did not want to create some kind of monster in my lab - I only wanted to restore what had been unfairly taken away.

So here's the take-away from this window, kids.  Try this at home.  But be warned - I don't know what, if any, laws you might be breaking (and neither does anybody else) doing this to your own toilet.  But if you go into business modifying toilets, I have a feeling you will definitely feel the wrath of Big Brother (this would be a violation of federal law).  But I do not believe that I did anything wrong.  The water I use to flush my toilet is, I believe, less than when I had a "proper" low-flow toilet, since the "low-flow" requires multiple flushes.  But that isn't really the point.  The point is that some idiot, somewhere, dictated something and the result, incredibly, was that my toilet wouldn't flush properly.  Not only did this have very little to do with sewage management or water management, it actually ended up using more water, as we all learned from King of the Hill.

I do understand that water is something that we all share.  Water can never be used, only borrowed.  The same water that rained on Socrates flows in rivers today.  I know that I have an obligation to "play nice" and not hog it, and I know that some people, if confronted by my modified toilet, might jump to the conclusion that I am, in fact, being a pig and using more than my share (especially if the word "hacker" is thrown around).  But, in fact, I use less water - in the long run.  Unfortunately, the phrase "in the long run" usually indicates that something is just beyond the grasp of the herd.  Politicians know this and will provide a "short term" solution no matter what.  So it goes.

I don't know what stupidity I may encounter tomorrow.  But somehow I know that my first reaction to it will not be to write to a politician.  I will want to do what a few hardy souls have always done.  I will want to start hacking.