Day 159 - What's Going On In the Bathroom?

image by homespot hq,
via Flickr.com

Last week our toilet started talking to us again, gurgling and bubbling, so we called Henry the Plumber to come back to check out the lengths of replacement to our sewer that he put in back in January. We were worried that he might have to do more work, digging up our travertine floor, at high cost. So we were relieved to learn that we are dealing with low-flush technology on top of high-flush-required sewer lines. The solution is as simple as changing our choice of toilet paper and flushing twice. But the solution seems to undo the purpose for the low-flush toilets.

I had always wondered about those toilet paper commercials that started out with a woman saying, "It's time to get real about what goes on in the bathroom." Until that series of commercials came out, I never thought there were any mysteries about what goes on in the bathroom. I have more than 60 years of taking advantage of bathroom facilities and I never found it necessary to wonder about it.

But then we moved to California, the land of environmental movements and ecology organizations. John Muir formed the Sierra Club in San Franciso in 1892, nearly a century and a quarter ago. The first Earth Day was planned during a UNESCO Conference held in San Francisco in 1969. I was introduced to recycling in the early 1970s when I lived in Berkeley.

Image by MyEyeSees, via Flickr

In 1992, then President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act which mandated toilets not use more than1.6 gallons of water per flush, less than half the amount previously used. The reason: to conserve water, of course. But when only the toilets were changed, the sewers didn't always clear up with a single flush. Flushing twice is often necessary. So the reason for mandating the low-flush toilets, to conserve water, ends up being undone. And "what goes on in the bathroom" is about the paper that doesn't always make its way into the main sewers because of the lack of pressure. The biggest offenders - the softest paper.

That is what we have found. In spite of our desire to conserve water, especially since southern California rarely has enough rainfall for its needs, double flushing, wasting water, is necessary, because the alternative of settling for less than soft paper just isn't something we are willing to consider in our household.

Around the same time as our most recent gurgling toilet incident, Alex noticed workmen outside doing something to the sewer lines in the street. Cities in California have found it necessary to send pressurized streams of water through the sewers more often as a result of the increase in the number of low-flush toilets in use. That high pressure through the sewers in the streets can result in water in the lines between the houses and the streets being siphoned out, emptying the traps, allowing sewer gas to escape until the toilets are all flushed again to fill the traps. Clearly, something is going on in the bathrooms in California that my years of living in other states and countries hadn't prepared me for.