Short answer, the cheap one will probably do the job, provided it's the right one, Reece Plumbing probably won't sell a bad one and I know they have pan cistern sets for under $300 because I recently needed just a replacement Caroma cistern and Caroma wanted almost 700 clams just for the cistern, I went to Reece and got a set called Dominique Posh for $280, I just used the cistern and saved the pan for a rainy day, should that be "pooy day?"
7 Years ago I would definitely have told you to spend the big bucks and get a caroma because they had been engineered to stop the "marking" associated with the new low flush volume pans (Marking is a nice way of saying "poop stripe" down the back of the pan). It's now possible that the cheap Asian imports have caught up with Caroma in the design of their pans and the direction of flow of the flush water.
A bit of history from back in 2007
www.smh.com.au/national/flushed-with-the-best-intentions-20070621-gdqfpb.html Can you believe that dual flush pans were so bad when they first came out that there was a black market operating in secondhand full flush pans for new homes?
To this day, I think it was a bad idea for the industry to chase that additional green star by dropping the flush volumes down to 4.5 or even 4 litres, from the original 6 litre full flushes. On far too many occasions people still feel the need, maybe just out of embarrassment, to give a pan an additional flush or two, and before you know it, you've flushed away 12 litres and there's still probably a baked on turd that the next person with waste a few flushes trying to dispose of.
Better it just has the full 6 litres right from the start when the offending material was still a bit movable.
By the way, I not advocating that anyone should do this, but it sure did look like it would have been easy to just extend the overflow pipe on that new cistern to give a 6 litre flush. But that would be wrong
BTW, I'm not a plumber, I manage properties and refurbishment's.
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