Proficiency: Canada's Most Efficient Flush Toilet?

It might make me a dork, but I am really excited about my new toilets.  We picked up two "Stealth" toilets from Niagara Conservation.  Actually here in Canada they are marketed as "Proficiency" from Water Matrix.  It is hard to find them though.  They are only currently carried in Ontario / Alberta / and Manitoba so I had to get mine from the Lowe's in Ottawa. 

In picking a toilet, there are two numbers you should pay attention to: Performance and Efficiency.

Performance
The Maximum Performance or MaP test measures how well toilets actually flush away waste.   The test results are in grams and represent how much latex encased miso paste the toilet can consistently flush down.

250 g -  Average male bowel movement
350 g - Minimum performance allowed
600 g - Average performance (on par with old-school non-efficient toilets)
1000g - Top end of measurement scale (if this doesn't work for you, you should probably see a doctor)

The stealth toilet is rated at 650 g and at least one independent test put it at 800g.

Water Efficiency
How many litres per flush (lpf) or Gallons per flush (gpf) does the toilet use?

13L  / 3.5 gpf - Typical pre-90s toilet
6L    / 1.6 gpf - Maximum North American flush volume since 1992 regulations
4.8L / 1.3 gpf - High Efficiency Toilet
4L    / 1    gpf - Pressure Assist Toilet or Liquid flush on dual flush toilets

Stealth toilet:  3L / 0.8 gpf!! 25% more efficient than pressure assist toilets and half the government standards.

How it pulls this off is pretty ingenious.  Traditional toilets just use the weight of water to flow through the bowl and push the waste out.  When low flow toilets became standard, some people were disappointed with the performance so manufacturers started to produce pressure assist toilets.  These toilets use pressurized air to force the water out of the tank and into the bowl at higher speeds.  This gives the toilets their distinctive whoosh noise and also gives a bigger push to the waste.

The Proficiency (or Stealth) toilet is a vacuum-assist toilet.  So rather than just push the waste it also pulls it.  When the water drains from the tank, the resulting vacuum is used to suck the water out of the bowl and down the drain. (They explain it much better and with pretty graphics on their website.)

So does it work? We now have both installed and our review is all positive.  It is so quiet and uses so little water that you actually don't expect it to work.  When it quickly clears the bowl, I find myself thinking "oh it got lucky that time".  But it gets lucky every time.

The Savings?  Changing our old 13L toilet to a 3L will reduce our water consumption by almost 78,000L a year.  That is enough water to fill up a very large backyard pool.  That would also save the average Canadian homeowner $70 a year.  Our water is un-metered (we don't pay based on usage) so we see none of that savings, but for a $200 toilet that would be a pretty good return on investment.

The toilet also got us 2 points towards LEED certification for meeting the Very High Efficiency Standard of <=4.1 Lpf and 350g MaP.


I have added a brief follow-up review after 18 months of use.