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Having trouble getting up off the toilet or easing gently onto it is no laughing matter! A toilet that is high enough for you to sit with your hips just a little higher than your knees usually takes less physical effort to sit on if you have weakness in your legs or pain in the joints of your back or legs.
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| The toilet riser increases
height economically, but needs to be cleaned. |
There are a lot of ways to get a toilet seat higher. Many folks will add a riser to the top of the toilet either replacing the toilet seat or lifting the toilet seat. These risers work, but they don’t feel the same as a regular toilet seat and they require cleaning.
Another way to get a taller toilet is to lift the whole toilet with a product like a toilevator. This can give almost any toilet a 3.5” boost and it doesn’t add an extra toilet cleaning chore.
It is also fairly inexpensive now to simply replace a short toilet with an ADA compliant height toilet. Some manufacturers have started calling this “comfort height” and it is truly more comfortable for most Adults who are over 5’ tall to get up and down from 17” high toilets. If you check out the height of most of the chairs in your home, you’ll notice that most of them are around 17” high or even higher than that. No wonder a standard 15” high toilet seems short!
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| The toilevator lifts the
entire toilet. Here a round bowl toilet is used because the space in front of the toilet is limited. |
One thing people don’t realize is that they don’t necessarily need to purchase an elongated bowl when they replace a short toilet with a taller one. There is nothing wrong with an elongated bowl. Frankly, there are a lot of great reasons to go with an elongated bowl if you have the room. For instance, people with larger buttocks or extremely tall people will feel more comfortable and find an elongated bowl more functional.
The problem with elongated bowls usually pops ups in two situations. When the toilet is between the door and other fixtures in the room, an elongated bowl will take up an additional 1 ½” of the path. That may not seem like much but if you have a 5’ wide room and the toilet takes up 30” of it, you only have 30” left for a walker or wheelchair. Other things in the room like vents and doors can take up some of those precious inches too. If you have a bathroom where the door has just enough room to swing by the standard toilet, switching over to an elongated toilet may actually block the door. Whoops!
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| There is room to spare in front of this elongated bowl toilet. |
So by all means raise the height of your toilet. You will love it as long as you can keep your feet on the ground. Just make sure you look at all your options so you don’t create other problems.
