Environmental Designworks Sink Positive Tank Lid Sink

1) You do your business in the toilet

2) Stand up and flush

3) CLEAN water starts pouring out of the little faucet

4) You wash your hands with it

5) As you do so, the toilet bowl fills up with soapy water from your hand wash

The water savings comes from NOT walking over to the sink to wash your hands with MORE clean water right after you flush. The soapy water only drains into the toilet bowl, not the tank, which keeps things a lot cleaner. All you will notice, really, is a little white cloudiness in the toilet bowl water from your soap.

The water runs out of the faucet for as long as it takes to fill your tank back up. That's plenty of time for us to get a good soapy hand wash. I've usually dried my hands and left before it stops running.

Please consider buying one of these to help clean tap water stretch further in your area. Water is becoming a scarcer resource as our population grows and demand increases. Sometimes it takes some pretty extreme measures to gather and divert enough water from our wilderness to support humans. Damming valleys, diverting rivers, and draining lakes isn't good if you enjoy the outdoors.

And saving a bit on your water bill is nice too. This is an easy way to do so. As an added bonus, everyone who comes over to your house and sees this thing will get a kick out of it.

Yeah, you think I'm joking but I'm not.  The Sink Positive is so cool.  Deej and I just installed one.  It probably would have taken even less time had we actually read the instructions.  But it's not very complicated.  All you do is turn off the water, take off your existing lid, unplug the tube that goes from the water source to the toilet overflow pipe, twist in the faucet bit to the Sink Positive lid, pop on some tubing, connect a tube here and there, batta bing batta boom, you've got yourself a greywater system!

Helpful hint on installation: They mention this on the instruction sheet (which we read part way through after we realized the sink was about to overflow the first time we tried to use it), but each toilet is a little different in terms of size.  You need to make sure that the tubing that goes from the drain hole on the sink into the toilet overflow pipe isn't bent or hitting the bottom of the pipe.  If it is, the water in the sink won't drain into the tank quickly enough to shut off the water and you'll end up with something of a waterfall going down the front of your toilet.  We cut about 1 and 1/4" off the bottom of our tube and that solved everything.

The flow from the faucet is really quite strong and nice and provides PLENTY (more than plenty) of water for you to wash your hands.  In fact, with one tester flush, Deej and I were both able to wash our hands.  It was crazy.

Another quick note on the design, I'm a fan of the fact that there's a little dish area for a bar of soap built into the left hand side of the lid.  You can also set a thing of liquid soap on the sink extender to the right hand side (depending on the size of your toilet tank).  You can see how we've got ours set up in this action shot.

You do have to bend over the toilet a little, or maybe straddle it if you prefer that.  So that's a tad awkward, but once you get used to it, it's cool.  There is also a little bit of splashing if you're an "active hand washer" because (at least on our toilet), the water comes out with a good amount of force and it's a small sink.  So if other folks are in line after you, you may just have to let them know you didn't miss the toilet bowl...it's just water.  Or else just take a little more time and be a little more gentle on the ol' paws.  Then you really just have to watch out with dripping when you move your hands away from the sink to where ever you've got your hand towels.

All in all, it's awesome.  I'm thoroughly pleased.  It's a tad pricey (the $129.95 is plus S&H)...but hey, good karma and water conservation are worth it.