How American Standard Champion 4 Toilets are Built, Part 2

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Summary: Tom visits American Standard's Design Center and factory to learn how the Champion 4 toilet is made.

GRAY: We use 24 golf balls to show the tremendous volume that a Champion 4 can take out. Go ahead and flush it.

TOM: Wow. Now, golf balls aren't the official testing media. You have some examples down here, though.

GRAY: No, there are industry tests. There is a sponge. They're dried and wet. There are polypropylene balls. We flush them and count how many remain. There's ground corn cob that gets scattered on the inside. It must be all taken out. There's an engineered paper we use.

TOM: And what are these?

GRAY: And those are granules. The black ones float. The white ones sink. We flush and count what remains.

TOM: All right, so you're really covered. So with all this testing that you guys are doing, Gray, can you give me an example of one thing you learned that maybe affected a future design?

GRAY: Sure, as we do all this testing, on our original Champion, we had this flush tower.

TOM: Okay.

GRAY: We learned from our one piece to shorten it up, increase the diameter of the actual seal-

TOM: Right.

GRAY: And the shape of it accelerates the water. So we get much higher performance with our new tower design.

TOM: Now, you're using less and less water. Are you concerned about the impact of that reduction of water on the infrastructure? I mean, is there enough water to really move the waste down the line once it gets through the toilet.

GRAY: We are, and we have a special rig just to test that. I'd like to show it to you.

TOM: Let's take a look.

So Gray, you've got me up on this platform with another bucket full of golf balls. How does this test tell us the impact of a 1.6 gallon toilet on the infrastructure?

GRAY: Well, Tom, you're on the first floor of a two-story test rig. Above you is the second floor toilet. Down here is a three-inch and a four-inch drain line carry. This is the minimum slope allowed by code today over a 60-foot run. So go ahead and flush the golf balls.

So we do 1.6 testing, and we know the results, and as we go to develop new, high-efficiency toilets that flush at 1.28, we've done thousands of hours of testing to make sure they're going to perform and it will have no impact on the drain line carry.

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