Low Toilet Pressure

[Anonymous]

My upstairs toilet is not getting the pressure it needs to flush. Water comes in, but hardly swirls around. My house was built in the late 1920s. The toilet was originally a wall-mount type and may have had a tank on top, I’m not sure. At some point, probably recently, it was replaced with an American Standard wall-mount “industrial-type” toilet. What I mean by “industrial” is that this is the type of toilet you find in a commercial building, that is fed by a higher pressure water line than is found in homes. It also has the chromed flush valve fixtures on it.
It makes sense to me that this toilet is not set up for residential water line pressure (being that it is located on the second floor doesn’t help either, I would think).
I have been told by a guy at a plumbing hardware store that he didn’t know where to get a wall-mount tank-type toilet (which is what I figure I really SHOULD have). He said I might need a pressure assist tank on my water line coming into the toilet, this would add about 30 pounds of pressure, according to him.
On the side of the toilet is printed 3.5 GPF. I have figured that 3.5 gallons of water weighs about 30 lbs, so this sounds right to me, but I’m not a plumber.
Where should I look for such a thing? Can I put it in myself? What should I do?
It has been suggested recently that I use a bladder-type “extension tank” (don’t know if that’s the correct term) where there is an elastic bladder that would refill when the flush valve closes and the bladder provides some extra “umph”, besides the volume of water, but it may have to me mounted in the bathroom, so it doesn’t have to work against gravity to go from the basement to the second floor. Is this a viable option?

[Scott BryanParticipant]

Your problem is not so much the pressure but volume. Flushometers for a 3.5 closet require a minimum of a 1″ supply feeding the flushometer. There is no tank that I have ever seen that you can put on top of your existing bowl. I would suggest you replace the toilet with a Kohler Wellesley toilet that should solve your problem.
Good luck,
Scott

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