When I was young I was, my parents thought, "toilet trained" for life. They were very wrong... according to former US vice-president, Al Gore (see Aside, below)
Be warned, using a new American toilet is no longer a simple matter, not if it is a mandatory Al Gore toilet. In keeping with the eco nonsense in his book Earth in the Balance, he thinks our "blue planet" (unique as being the only planet deluged with water) has a "water shortage". We hear the same nonsense here when it doesn't rain. There's so much water everywhere that the opinion that there's supposedly a water shortage is silly. The amount of available water is determined the same way that we acquire everything else from nature: at a cost.
Anyhow, in order to "save" water, which is an absurd concept since the quantity on earth is constant, new American toilets, by regulation, have to flush less. There's no end to the absurdities in the scheme. The man who nearly became "leader' of the not so free world, didn't mandate baths, jacuzzis, hot tubs and swimming pools to be smaller or half full. He didn't regulate tap nozzle sizes, watering cans or hose sizes for watering gardens and washing cars. Washing machines, kitchen sinks and basins still retain their water wasting proportions. But toilets! Over flush, and you are tipping the balance against earth. (Where it goes then he doesn't tell us in his book.)
He did at least contrive one other silly regulation: the flow size of shower nozzles. If you use an Al Gore toilet or an Al Gore shower, you are water-deprived. But not if you use one of countless alternatives in your kamikaze mission to destroy earth. Typically, showers use a third less water than baths. Gore's trickle shower encourages people have more water wasting baths, which gores Gore.
Using Gore's toilet can be the source of hours of perverse entertainment. Because they are water deprived, they often don't flush properly. Unsuspecting defecators do the obvious thing: a second flush. That this uses more water than a single old fashioned pre-Gore flush, did not seem to strike the designers. The fact that neither of the two or more trickle-flushes needed provided enough thrust to flush a toilet effectively, means that the bowl fills and overflows. If you are doubly unfortunate, Al's toilet valve - the logic behind which I never established - doesn't close.
This explains why, when I used Walter and Connie Williams' Gore toilet at 5 am in their Philadelphia home, I flooded their upstairs bathroom with a mess you don't want to know about!
Not wanting to wake them, I did my best. I opened the lid of Mr. Gore's anti-flush flusher, and eventually - grovelling around in sub zero water - stopped the flow. I placed their beloved guest towels across the door to stop flooding their hallway and stairs.
Being a typical American wood frame house, the floodwaters dripped through to the passage and room below. In this unfamiliar house, I eventually found buckets and tins to catch the dripping water. I found in their garage and garden (in the snow at night) whatever I could to try and unblock the toilet: a piece of garden hose, swimming pool chemicals, a coil spring, and more. Three hours later, after cleaning the mess as best I could, I capitulated, and left the toilet bowl filled to the brim with a view to calling a plumber at daybreak.
During an uncommonly lavatorial breakfast discourse, and subsequent enquiry, I learned that my nocturnal encounter with Mr. Gore was no special experience: that new-comers are safe only if forewarned not to double flush Al's mess; and that Gore toilets have plungers close at hand (unknown to me, in the cupboard under the basin in this case).
This is what the world's most technologically advanced country has come to.
Gore toilets are simply another example of misguided regulation having counter productive effects. Not only don't they save water, but they fail to do so in a country in which most of the population lives where there is a surfeit of water, on a planet characterised uniquely by a surface consisting primarily of water - lots of it, down to unimaginable depths - and land covered by clouds and water dependent plants, much of it being jungles and swamps (nowadays romantically called "rain forests" and "wetlands").
Aside: The "Gorlet"
Former US Vice President Al Gore supported a US federal water conservation law in 1994 forcing builders and homeowners to install 1,6 gallon "low flush" toilets (known in the vernacular as Gore toilets or Gorlets).
These new loo's replaced the previous 3,5 gallon models which themselves had replaced the 5 to 6 gallon models of the 1970s era. Gordon Liddy calls the Gorlet "toilet totalitarianism".
In August 2000 the New York Times carried an article about people who smuggled 3,5 gallon toilets into the US from Canada. Meantime other toilet tinkers give advice that householders can get a plumber to hot rod a Gorlet by adjusting the small flapper, or float, to get the tank to fill beyond the Gorlet's design flush of 1,6 gallons.
