Toilets have changed a little in the last several decades, but possibly one of the more interesting (and insurance-saving) advances may be one that contractor Patrick Stack came up with on his own: a toilet that won’t, or can’t, overflow. After seeing tons and tons of utterly waterlogged and destroyed bathroom floors during various remodel projects, Pat decided to look into a way to combine the technology into the Penguin Toilet that provides alternate drain options for sinks into the standard toilet. A toilet with overflow protection—fancy that!
I’d be satisfied if the darn things would just flush and not leak due to the effects of hard water on flapper valves. In any case, the new toilet uses a secondary drain with its own independent trap – similar to a sink or bathtub, except that the second drain doesn’t tie into the same trap, so it can flow independently of a clogged toilet. Check out the bottom view of the Penguin toilet:
The solution looks like a toilet with three elevated drain holes which simply redirect overflow. The concept took five years and dealing with manufacturers who wanted nothing to do with the idea. The “toilet man”, as his wife describes him, decided to strike out on his own and get it prototyped. Now, Stack and his business partner own the worldwide patent on the new toilet design and they’ve been selling the new product to hotels, hospitals and, yes, homeowners.
And it’s called the Penguin Toilet. Check it out in action:
The model 524 is an ADA-compliant high bowl, two-piece version and is actually available at Lowe’s and runs around $188. So far, the design seems to be very basic, with no one-piece solutions or models that support advanced flushing mechanisms. I would hope that manufacturers like Kohler and American Standard would be interested in licensing the design so that soon all toilets would share this feature. The markup on toilets is such that a reasonable licensing fee should be able to be absorbed fairly easily.
Check out the specs:
- 3” Flush Valve
- Exclusive Penguin Protection: secondary drain system that helps protect against toilet overflows
- Drop in replacement for existing bowl with 12” rough-in
- High bowl is ADA compliant
- 2” Fully glazed trapway
- 1,000 gram MAP Score
- WaterSense Listed
