November 12th, 2009
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Would you feel guilty if your toilet was “phantom flushing” or slowly leaking gallons of water a day?
Leak Alertor
We would, and we’d be concerned about the costs on our water bill too.
A Philadelphia-area company feels our pain. The company, nth Solutions, has invented the Leak Alertor to let you know when the water closet is out of control, so you can get in there and fix the flap or that other thinga-majig that makes the toilet behave.
Nth Solutions’ staff has done a lot of research on this topic of wasted water too. They report that at any given time, one in five toilets in the US is leaking. So in the US, where the residential person-to-commode ratio is pretty high, 50 million toilets might be silently leaking.
That info comes from the American Water Works Association, an industry association that is committed to clean, safe water (and a thriving water industry). If it’s true, and we’re guessing the AWWA is in a position to know, you can start to see why you might need a Leak Alertor.
Still, we asked Eric L. Canfield, president of nth Solutions, to give us a little more to go on and he did.
Leaking toilets, he said, are the number one cause of high water bills and the average leaking toilet can waste hundreds of gallons of water a day or enough to fill a couple swimming pools if left to leak away for a year or so.
Yikes, you’d have to take a lot of one-minute showers to pay back that water debt!
But, still, we respectfully prodded Canfield: Wouldn’t I know it if my toilet were leaking? Wouldn’t it wake me up at night with a faint little whiney sound?
No, he said, it wouldn’t necessarily alert you. (But the Leak Alertor would, with a little red light.) Many leaks are silent. Furthermore, he explained, many people with less than perfect hearing might not catch a leaky toilet, and others, who do hear that “phantom flush” misinterpret it and think all is well in water closet land.
And so, Canfield has the solution, a water-conserving, made-in-America solution that’s a bit of a hard sell in these times, but does only cost $19.95: The Leak Alertor, installable in less than a minute, without tools.
Who knew?
Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media
