This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short.  If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on.  I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.

We don’t flush our toilet every time we use it.  Rather, we flush as little as possible.

Our motto is,

If it’s yellow, let it mellow.
If it’s brown, flush it down.

It saves water, which saves us a little bit of money on our water bill and, more importantly, saves potable drinking water.  We try to lessen our consumption of natural resources wherever we can and this is an easy step to take.  Even though we have a relatively new, low-flow toilet, it still takes water to flush it so we minimize our daily flushes.

I’ve found that our toilet isn’t any worse off as long as I scrub it about once a week (which is what it needs anyway).  It’s a little embarrassing if I forget to flush the toilet before visitors come over but other than that, this has been an easy change for us.

Once Ellie gets a bit older, we’ll teach her the rule.  For now, I just don’t remind her to flush unless we need to.  Sometimes she wants to (and I let her) and sometimes she doesn’t.  Eventually, she’ll learn the rule for home.  Then we’ll just have to teach her the “flush every time when you’re not at home” rule.

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I like this post – the author actually calculated her money/water savings by not flushing!

Some stats about water usage and flushing for you in this article if you’re interested in the reasons behind why we made this change.  Here’s the main reason, as quoted from that article:

We take about 1.6 gallons of good drinking water to flush 10 ounces of urine down the toilet. In doing so, the 1.6 gallons become undrinkable.