I have bought two of these toilets from Costco and love them both. Best toilet I have owned yet. Terry the
so called expert plumber does not know what the hell he is talking about. He just can't sell his toilets for
that kind of money, so he is running down Costcos. Both toilets flush great, and liquid flush I use most
of the time. When it is the solid flush, it does a great job and has plenty of water to flush everything
down. It averages out to 1.2 gal. per flush and saves me a lot of water. I give it an A+
I am not of the opinion that everything from Costco is crap. We get meat, cheese and produce there that rivals anything in the best shops here in Manhattan. Their prices are great, if not always the lowest. More importantly, they focus on service. For example, their truly-excellent and proud service in the tire shop blows away anything I have experienced at the Mercedes dealer. We bought a very expensive, high-quality massage chair there. Paper goods, water, button-down shirts, HP computers, printers, televisions, DVD players, plants, flowers -- all name brands from Costco and all provided with excellent service, excellent support, and an amazing return policy. If they have the thing that you are looking for in the model that you are looking for, it's a great place. If not, you get it somewhere else.
But there is no reason to attack Terry personally for his opinion, which I value and trust. The toilets that he recommends are premium products, even if they are cheaper than many lesser products at places like Home Depot. He expects them to last a long time without problems. He guarantees his installations, which he performs thoughtfully, professionally, and at what seems to this New Yorker to be an amazing price, given his expertise and willingness to do things for free that other plumbers where I live would charge extra for. I expect that because he guarantees his work, he wants to install something that he is (a) not going to get complaints about from the customer and (b) isn't going to have to come back and fix for free within two years. The consensus here and elsewhere is that when you put in a Toto toilet, most likely the only thing you are going to have to fix within the first 5 years, if even then, is the flapper. And maybe, if you get crud in it, the diaphragm on the Korky fill valve. Both of these can be done by mere mortals, and the parts are readily available at almost any local hardware store for less than $5, and at Lowe's for less than that. Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, if you need to change a valve, there is no reason to believe that you won't be able to find replacement parts easily, cheaply and locally, just like we still can for the more-generic, 50-year-old American Standard toilets.
The consensus about these Water Ridge toilets seems to be that the initial investment is low, and they seem to satisfy many of their purchasers when they work properly, no doubt because there isn't much not to like for $89, and if you find it fun (as I do) to install your own toilet then it's just another fun project to undertake if you have to replace the thing. However, the total initial investment isn't so low if you have to pay someone $300 to put it in; in that circumstance it probably behooves a person to make a little-higher investment in materials to avoid the need for the expensive professional to return to repair or replace the thing.
What also seems to be the consensus about the Water Ridge toilets is that they have a non-standard mechanism that comes out of whack over time. It appears from some comments here that if one knows what to do about that, one may be able to get back in business on one's own. If not, as would be the case for most people (and maybe even many local plumbers unfamiliar with the product), then an expensive headache awaits.
And I don't think that too many can argue that that's the deal.
If you have had a good experience and you are prepared to fix the thing when it finally does break, great. But that's no reason to crassly impugn the integrity of a friendly, honorable guy that understandably doesn't want to be dragging himself back out to a customer over and over to fix something that has now cost the customer more in total cost than the customer would have spent if he had just paid another $120 in materials to get the premium Toto Drake. And customers like that are never happy people. Also, Terry always seems to approach even the most inane questions on here welcomingly and with good cheer. You're entitled to your opinion, but you should be ashamed of yourself.