I gave my understanding husband a Toto low-flush toilet for Christmas. It cost about $400 installed. According to the plumber that installed it, I bought the top of the line. "I saw a demo of one of these at the plumbing show last month.", he tells me. "They're amazing. And look, the toilet seat doesn't slam." Maybe I spent too much. (Homedepot.com has Kohler low-flush toilets for $99 - sans seat.)

I bought the toilet for 2 reasons. 1. The one we had didn't work properly. Seems hard water is the culprit. 2. We wanted to replace our water guzzling toilet with the low-flush kind. According to the EPA:

Toilets (at 3.5 gallons per flush) account for nearly 40 percent of the indoor water use in a typical home. More than 4.8 billion gallons of water is flushed down toilets each day in the United States. The average American uses about 9,000 gallons of water to flush 230 gallons of waste down the toilet per year.

4.8 billion gallons of water flushed down the toilet daily! And those statistics are from 1991. (I couldn't find more current ones.) Must be over 5 billion by now.

Before our new toilet purchase, my family had already made several changes that saved a considerable amount of water. (To be honest, we didn't have a choice. Our septic system was backing up due to water use and age.) We installed low-flow shower heads. We switched to the speed cycle on our dishwasher. We filled soy milk bottles with water and placed them in the tank of our toilets to displace some of the water. And we started living by the jingle they teach in California summer camps:

"If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down"

We save 3 to 5 gallons for every "non-flush" in our old house. Too bad we have to wait for a drought like the one California had in the early 90's to adhere to this old adage. (I guess it's safe to flush in Southern California these days...)