They said ‘add only one bottle in toilet cistern’ |02 September 2011

It sounded like a brilliant idea so we tried it at home.

Since we are a large family living in a house with two toilets, the difference a 1.5-litre bottle in each made was immediately noticeable in the amount of water we preserved, yet the toilets worked just as well as before.

But talk of trying to make something good even better: We wondered about putting yet another bottle in each since there was room in the cisterns, and the results were remarkable – 100% efficiency – or so it seemed.

Every time we flushed, the toilet was left as clean as if we had used an entire seven litres and the temptation to see what would be the limit was so big we kept adding more Pet bottles, this time the half-litre ones, until we could fit in no more without interfering with the flushing mechanism.

Having read in the Nation that people should install water-economical devices, we kept wondering why they don’t sell smaller cisterns if so little water works.

Soon we forgot the modification we had made and simply enjoyed lower water usage for several weeks, until our actions came back to haunt us recently:

The sewerage system was blocked, and opening the manholes, we saw it was not just a part of the drains that had a problem, but the entire length, all the way from the septic tank.

Unclogging it used so much water it drained most of our reserves, but thank God we get most of the water for the toilets from roof catchment, and it has been showering quite significantly recently so our stocks were have been replenished.

Editor, we share this with your other readers who are keen to put in practice the useful advice from experts you publish from time to time to show it works, but also to urge those inclined to try improving on the water conservation method that adjustments may not work even if they seem to.

Conservation-minded family
Anse Boileau