Sanigloss vs No Sanigloss
About 2 months ago I purchased 3 Toto Elongated Ultramax toilets. 2 of them had no sanigloss, which cost me $360 a piece and one had Sanigloss, which cost $410. I had been reading this site for several years. I had been experiencing clogging problems in my 1.6 gal toilets for some time in my last 2 homes, and had come very close to buying pressure-assisted toilets from Lowe's and Home Depot, but I am glad I did NOT....In my current home, which I had purchased 2.5 years ago, the developer used Kohler Wentworth gravity toilets. Consumer Reports actually wrote a good review on these toilets flushing ability, but it was only this site (Terry Love's site) that criticized and questioned the validity of the Consumer Reports study partially by pointing out that they did NOT think real plumbers were doing the study I did find that though the Kohler Wentworth 1.6 gal gravity flush toilets did NOT clog as much as the 1.6 gal toilets that I had used at my previous house, they still did clog and overflow, which was causing my wife and kids a lot of heartache and grief...It was only on this site that I "discovered" TOTO and its G-MAX technology. The TOTO toilets did solve my clogging problem, and my family is extremely pleased and happy with this....However, on this site I discovered that TOTO had this Sanigloss technology, which I had never heard of before. Was Sanigloss worth the extra money (which is about $50 to $60) more??? I did NOT get a clear answer to this from reading user comments on this web site (or in fact any web site)...The most useful comment I got was that the Toto Ultramax (without Sanigloss) was already a pretty clean toilet and did NOT need Sanigloss. Over the last 2 months, I would ask my wife if she thought the Sanigloss toilet was better or cleaner than the non-Sanigloss toilets...My wife's simple answer to the question was that she really did NOT see a difference...She however did say that because of the small amount of water in the toilet bowel of our Toto toilets (versus the "fuller" amount of water in our Kohler Wentworth toilets) that Toto toilets did need to be kept cleaned....When you look at the Sanigloss TOTO Ultramax toilet and the Toto Ultramax toilet with NO Sanigloss, you CANNOT see a physical difference EXCEPT for the fact that there is a little sticker on the Sanigloss toilet labeling it to have Sanigloss. Based on what my wife said and what I read on Terry Love's web site, I would not buy the Sanigloss again and save the $60 cost fee....However that WAS BEFORE I read Norm Wu's outstanding technical article "Nanotech Toilets Take Off" on Sanigloss on this web site...From the electron scanning microscope diagrams, it shows that BOTH brand new porcelain toilets from TOTO with Sanigloss and WITHOUT Sanigloss were RELATIVELY smooth. After about 3 years, the porcelain on TOTO toilets without Sanigloss (and, in fact, any toilet) became rougher and more susceptible to staining & "dirt". This helps to explain why right now on all my brand new TOTO toilets I do NOT see any real difference....I do NOT like seeing my wife (or any member of my family) spending time cleaning toilets. From Norm Wu's article, sanigloss is a special material "baked-on" to the toilet bowl surface at about 800 to 1200 degrees Centigrade, and will keep your toilet bowl relatively smooth and like new for about 100 years...This will help minimize time and work spent on cleaning toilet bowls by about 50%, especially as the toilet ages...I also read in the article that Terry Love sells a lot of Sanigloss toilets to doctors....For these reasons, if I had to buy my TOTO toilets again, I would buy them all 100% with Sanigloss...You cannot buy TOTO toilets in a retail hardware store like Home Depot or Lowe's. However, I am sold on TOTO toilets, and reluctantly have to admit that they are indeed superior to their American counterparts.
Ken Young