St Joseph Hospital: Toilet Cistern

Toilet Cistern

The siphoning-toilet is perhaps the most popular design in North America for residential and light commercial toilet installations. Some other terms for these types of toilets are "siphon jet", "siphon wash", and in North America, "wash down". All siphoning-toilets incorporate an 'S' shaped water-way. The water-ways in these toilets are designed with slightly smaller diameters than a non-siphoning toilet, so that the water-way will naturally fill up with water, each time it is flushed, thus creating the siphon action. To flush the toilet the user activates a flushing mechanism (see above), which pours a large quantity of water quickly into the bowl. This creates a flow large enough to purge the bowl's water-way of all air, thus causing the bowl to empty rapidly due to the siphon action that has been created. This flow stops as soon as the water level in the bowl drops below the first bend of the siphon, allowing air to enter the S-pipe to break the column of liquid and to halt the siphonic action.A "true siphoning-toilet" can be easily identified by the noise it makes. If it can be heard to suck air down the drain at the end of a flush, then it is a true siphoning toilet. If not, then it is a non-siphoning toilet.