In a sport where records were broken incrementally, Olympic long jumper Bob Beamon amazed a world-wide audience in 1968 by leaping 21-3/4 inches farther than anyone had done before. Today, there's a term for such great leaps forward: Beamonesque.

That turns out to be a pretty realistic description of Niagara Conservation's new Stealth toilet. “This is the newest technology in the U.S., and there is no one else in the country offering a 0.8 gallon gravity flush toilet,” said Paul Kwiat, the company's wholesale business director. “You'll see some folks marketing a dual flush toilet with two flush tabs on top, one for water, one for solids, and they promote it as working on less than a gallon of water, but that's a combined ratio.” By contrast, the Stealth achieves its 0.8 gallon flush with solids, and meets the EPA WaterSense performance requirement in doing so.

Doing so required some fresh engineering ideas. In a traditional toilet design, there is a single trapway that removes all the waste from the bowl, propelled by simple gravity.

Stealth was designed with 2 trapways. The waste flows through the main trapway, but there's also a secondary trapway. “As water fills the tank, the air in the tank is displaced into the trapway of the bowl, and when that air is transferred to the secondary trapway, the trapway becomes pressurized, not the tank itself,” Kwiat explained.

In effect, flushing the toilet causes 2 types of pressurization in the structure of the bowl. The air displacement creates a vacuum which draws the waste material through the main trapway at the same time fresh water is forced through the bowl by gravity. As it flows in, the incoming water also rinses the bowl's interior surface area at the same time. The action is powered completely by gravity. “And this all happens very, very quietly because the pressurization isn't happening in the tank, it's happening in the bowl,” Kwiat stated.

The Stealth is projected to save an average family of 4 about 20,000 gallons of water per year. In a community-wide project, this technology might save millions of gallons of water. And if that's the cases, it would also conserve the resources used during the process of creating fresh water and dealing with the sewage.

The Stealth installs like any other toilet; no special tools are required. Niagara will begin shipping the new Ultra High Efficiency Toilet (UHET) to a national network of 2-step distributors early next year, with a suggested retail price under $300.

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