Shane said "I didn’t start pushing antifreeze through the plumbing until I installed the SeaLand toilet and the flush valve froze and cracked the first winter." In other words, you need to be able to push a bit of cold water through the cold water line to the toilet, without filling the water heater. And you need to do this only if you change the toilet. To do this, and avoid the whole bypass thing, would it not be possible to put a simple shutoff valve in the existing cold water feed to the water heater, thus avoiding the whole "how many gallons of antifreeze to fill it"?
Hey, I'm not telling anyone what to do, just putting out some possibilities. If you are a fan of bypasses, go for it. And if the factory started installing bypasses again, it is entirely possible that they did so because they re-routed the pipes, and now the system won't reliably gravity-drain. Or more likely, because someone came to them with the whole "need a bypass to save gallons of anti freeze" thing. Paul Wipf told me in person that this was the reason they started putting in a bypass in the first place.
Bill
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