Amazing! Toilets.

This fall, all students in Eliot, Kirkland and Dunster houses have more on their plates then just the regular class-picking and room-decorating decisions. Thanks to the new toilets installed in every bathroom, they must choose not only when to flush, but which way. The name? The dual-flush flushometer. The verdict? The jury, quite literally, is still sitting on it.

The dual-flush flushometer is a leafy-green, antiseptic-coated toilet handle that controls the amount of water used in each flush. Specifically, students flush upwards for “1” and downwards for “2.” The new handles were installed in the hope that the reduced water usage (1.1 gallons for liquid waste and 1.6 for solid waste) would benefit the environment. “I think it’s a good step in that it’s a very easy change for people to make, but it will save a lot of water in the long run,” one co-chair of Harvard’s Environmental Action Committee (EAC), Spring Greeney ‘09, says.

The environment may be happy, but student reaction, like the toilet handles, goes both ways.

Some students, like Eliot resident Prithvi R. Shankar ‘09, are excited by the dual action of the flushometers. “Thus far, I’d put my use rate at about eighty-five to ninety percent,” he says.

Others, however, are less enthusiastic. “I believe in traditional American values: football, shopping, and flushing with downward force,” Daniel Ross-Rieder ’08 says. “This up-flush fad will last one minute longer than the Macarena.”

Furthermore, many feel the plumbing improvements don’t go far enough. One Eliot house student complains that the toilets still have no lids. Others bemoan the loud and easily distinguishable flushes. The down-flush “splashes water on you … It’s a lot of power for a flush,” Emily E. Gellie ’09 says. Her overall opinion? “Well, our toilet flooded, so apparently they’re still pretty shitty.”