No matter if you’re shopping for a new toilet for your home or your business, it’s an accepted fact that you will need one. No bathroom can be complete, or even operable without one, after all.
The floor-mounted units have become standard over the years, but in the modern-day and age, a more minimalistic wall-hung toilet has been gaining popularity as well.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what each one is and at a few key differences between the two.
Wall-Hung and Floor-Mounted Toilets: The Basics
Before jumping into the differences between the two types of toilets, let’s take a look at what each of the two is.
What is a Wall-Hung Toilet?
As the name would suggest, a wall-hung toilet is a toilet that is mounted to and hung from the wall rather than mounted on the floor.
Wall-hung toilets will commonly be tankless and used in commercial properties or in situations where many toilets share a common drain and work together with each other.
To mount a wall-hung toilet, there must be a strong wall to support the weight of the unit, most commonly one made out of concrete.
What is a Floor-Mounted Toilet?
Similarly to the wall-hung toilets, you can probably imagine what a floor-mounted toilet is. These are toilets that are attached to the floor in your bathroom rather than the wall. This is the typical type of toilet that you’ll find in most residential applications, most likely even your own home.
Floor-mounted toilets are placed directly to the bathroom floor so that the sewage can drain straight down and meet up and merge with the sewage main of the property.
This type of toilet design is also usually far simpler to replace and install since you don’t need to suspend it off the ground while also trying to mount it to the wall.
Most floor-mounted toilets will have a tank on the back — although there are tankless options — that will empty when flushed and then automatically refill for the next use. That’s the running water sound you’ll hear after using the toilet, is the tank refilling above the bowl.
Wall-Hung vs. Floor-Mounted Toilet: What Are the Differences?
Now that you know the basics, let’s dive deeper into the differences between them.
Mounting Mechanism
As you might have guessed, the single most notable difference between the two toilets is how they are mounted. This is a big deal depending on the type of room that they’re being installed in and the surfaces that they are being mounted to.
For example, you can’t put a wall-hung toilet in a room and hang it off a sheetrock wall — it’ll pull the sheetrock right off. Similarly, to have a floor mounted toilet, you need to have a solid section of flooring to support the weight of a toilet combined with its users.
Tank
While both styles of toilets do have options of having a tank on the back or being tankless, the most common ways that you’ll find the toilets in will be consistent.
Usually, the wall-hung toilets will not have a tank and floor-mounted toilets will have a tank. This is easy to see by looking in most residential bathrooms, where people have a floor-mounted toilet that has a large tank behind its back.
Conversely, many wall-hung toilets will be tankless – think about the toilets you may commonly see in commercial applications.
Sewage Drains
This difference coincides with the mounting location and whether or not they have a tank — sewage drains.
For floor-mounted toilets, they are required to have their sewage drain right out of the bottom of the toilet so that they can connect to the main sewage drain of the property and be properly carried off the premises.
Wall-hung toilets instead often have a common connection between a number of the toilets — if it’s a commercial location — where the drains run together before draining off the premises. Or if it’s a residential toilet, it has to be routed a different way since the toilet will not be resting directly on the sewage drain.
Height Adjustability
While a standard floor-mounted toilet has a fixed height since it mounts directly to the floor, a wall-hung toilet offers a bit more flexibility during installation to allow you to easily change the height.
A floor-mounted toilet is going to set at whatever height the bowl of the toilet has because it needs to have a tight seal around the drainage pipe and can’t be shimmed or anything. With a wall-hung toilet, you can easily mount it at a different height — as long as you can still get the sewage handled properly — and it can be the perfect height for you to sit on.
Price
More than likely one of the comparisons that you were hoping to see in here somewhere, the price difference between the two. When it comes to a high-quality toilet of either of these types, you’ll most likely be paying a premium for a wall-hung unit when compared to a floor-mounted one.
This is true of both material costs as well as installation costs. Wall-hung toilets can range in price from a few hundred dollars up to a few thousand dollars due to their various shapes and designs. A floor-mounted toilet will usually only set you back a couple hundred to a few hundred dollars, so the price difference between the toilets can be quite a bit!
For more details on how much it costs to replace a toilet, check this article.
Which of the Two Should You Get?
While both options have their pros and cons, it should be a decision made separately by each person based on their circumstances. Let’s take a look at a couple of different cases to see which might be the better option for you.
If one of the main concerns in your search for a new toilet is the price, then you should be leaning towards going with a standard floor-mounted toilet. They get the job done and are be far cheaper than their wall-hung counterparts.
If you’re not as concerned about the price and you want to have the more modern, more minimalistic version of a toilet, then you should opt for a wall-hung unit. They take up less space, they look great on the wall, and they are far more modern than the standard floor-mounted units.
Summary
Deciding between a wall-hung toilet or a floor-mounted toilet may be a tougher decision than you were anticipating on making, but’s something that has to be done.
Between the two, keep in mind the differences including price, how they’re mounted, how the sewage works, their space-saving aspects, and the difference in flexibility in height.
Once you take all that into mind, make the best choice for your bathroom!