It's not the most glamourous purchase you can make for your home, but an important one nonetheless: a toilet.
The choices abound: standard toilet, elongated bowl, floor-mounted, wall-mounted.
There are even remote-control warmed, deodorized seats and high-efficiency toilets that use only four litres per flush.
Consumer Reports went to great lengths to find the top performers. Testers evaluated 25 toilets.
They filled the bowls with blue dye and then flushed to see how well the toilets removed liquid.
"You want a toilet that removes all the blue-dye and replaces it with fresh water," said Bob Markovich with Consumer Reports.
The Toto Ultramax II, equipped with a water-saving 1.28 gallon tank, couldn't get the job done.
"It took two flushes or 2.6 gallons. So much for saving water," Markovich said.
Some dual-flush toilets that that tout water saving didn't do that well, either.
To assess solid waste removal, testers filled toilets with 160 plastic balls, two latex cylinders and seven sponges weighted with screws.
When all the tests were done, Consumer Reports named several very good performers.
They included the Gerber Avalanche for $370. It has a standard 1.6 gallon tank.
A second toilet, the Kohler Cimarron, uses even less water and costs $500.
If you've got an old toilet, a leak can waste 300 litres of water a day. One way to check is to add some food colouring to the tank and wait about 15 minutes. If the water in the bowl changes colour, you've got a leak.
Unsure if it's worth repairing your broken toilet? If it was installed before 1995, it should probably be replaced. If it's newer, it might be worth fixing, unless the bowl is cracked.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Chris Olsen
