What Makes a Good Toilet? Here's What to Know.

Our recommended toilet, the TOTO UltraMax II

We've been installing and repairing toilets for over 30 years, and we've worked on just about every one out there. 

So when a customer asks for our advice about getting a new toilet, this is what we tell them they need to know.

The Porcelain

Just like anything else in the world, there's a quality spectrum to the porcelain that a toilet is made out of. There's low-quality porcelain, and then very hard, durable, dense porcelain. Cheaper toilets are made of lower quality porcelain, and they are much more susceptible to cracking. 

In addition to the porcelain, certain models of toilets have a proprietary surfacing, or glaze, over the top of the porcelain. A cheaper toilet doesn't have a good quality glaze, so in short order, it becomes very porous and it starts soaking up stains. 

And that's why you look in a lot of toilet bowls and you see a yellow or discolored brown rim around it inside of cheaper toilets. They look pretty out of the box, but then once you put them into use, the toilet quickly starts looking dingy or dull, as the glazing just wears away by regular cleaning and water being flushed through it year after year.

The Mold (But Not That Kind of Mold)

The design of the toilet is determined by the mold used to make it. 

Prior to 1997, toilets were pretty much universal. They flushed between three and five gallons per flush, and they pretty much all worked the same. And back then, it was easy to take parts out of a Kohler and put them into an American Standard, and vice versa. All toilets kind of worked in the same way; they all accepted universal parts, and there wasn't much mechanical difference between them. 

In 1997, the federal government mandated that all toilets manufactured and sold in the US had to be 1.6 gallons per flush or less, so all of the manufacturers of toilets had to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to make a toilet work with that amount of water. 

There's kind of a science to the waterways inside the toilet, how it's delivered, and transferred from the tank. Depending on the design of that toilet, it's going to either do a good or bad job of rinsing or washing down the bowl and transferring the water from the tank via gravity into the bowl in such a way that the bowl siphons and empties.

And some toilets are just poorly designed. They don't work well regardless of who installs it, or how it's repaired. They're just well known, poor performing toilets. You often find these builder grade, entry level products at Home Depot. Big box stores target an entirely different demographic, kind of taking advantage of the do-it-yourself nature of the audience.

The Mechanics

The mechanical feature of the toilet forces the flush to happen when you push the handle; it activates a series of mechanical functions that essentially transfer the water from the tank, through the bowl, through a series of waterways and jackets. 

There's a bunch of different parts that go into a toilet functioning correctly. And today's modern toilets all have a different brand and a different model, and all of the parts are proprietary to the toilet. 

So, long gone are the days of using universal toilet parts found at home centers. When we show up to repair a toilet, more times than not, the toilet installed before us has all these overly engineered, mechanical, proprietary parts that are expensive and difficult to come by. The toilet might even be a discontinued model, and parts for it aren’t made any more.

Our Recommendation

Because of all of these things, we exclusively recommend and use the TOTO UltraMax II. 

They use a very robust, strong porcelain and a quality glaze; as long as it’s not being used with harsh chemicals and abrasive cleaners, they will look as clean 10 years down the road as they did out of the box. 

They’re designed very well, and they use parts that are time tested. 

They’re predictably reliable, and they are relatively easy to come by. And most people appreciate the look of them.

As a professional plumber providing permanent solutions, I stand behind the product and have a lot of faith in it. I've installed thousands of them, and they've made a lot of happy customers for us.

Our team at Sutherland Plumbing is here to help with any issues you're experiencing. Message us through our contact form, call us at 503-719-4015, or text us at 971-247-1561.