Two high-flying toilets and five stinkers to avoid

If you think squeezing a toilet into your narrow powder room is hard, imagine what it's like designing a bathroom for a commercial airplane. We're seeing more compact toilets for the home, including the space-saving Gerber Viper toilet. Now airlines are benefiting from smaller commodes as well that can withstand high velocity while using minimal water, according to The Wall Street Journal. As demanding as those conditions are, they're nothing compared to the tests we put toilets through in our search for the top models.

To assess solid waste removal, our testers fill toilets with multiple plastic balls, a pair of latex cylinders, and seven sponges weighted with screws. Two models that performed very well in our tests, while using a miserly 1.28 gallons per flush, are the American Standard Clean 2514.101, available at Lowe's for $240, and the Kohler Cimarron The Complete Solution K-11813, $250 from plumbing supply stores.

But the mix of solid material we use in our toilet tests was enough to jam up the following models:
Kohler Devonshire K-3488
Mansfield Alto 137-160
Toto Aquia MS654204MS
American Standard H2Option Siphonic Dual Flush 2886.216
Gerber Maxwell Dual-Flush DF-21-118

There are several other well-performing models on our list of recommended toilets, including some that come with a rounded bowl rather than an elongated one, which saves space in a powder room or other tiny loo. "On airplanes, it's all about how you use the real estate," an aerospace executive told The Wall Street Journal. Anyone with a small bathroom would agree.

—Daniel DiClerico