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I don't know how many people have noticed, but there's been a revolution in American public bathrooms recently. There are now bathrooms with IR sensors on the toilets, which cause the toilet to flush when you stand up. There are faucets with IR sensors so the water runs when you stick your hands under it, (and stops when there's no one around).
When the IR sensors work, I really like this stuff because it means I don't have to touch the icky plumbing. I don't much like the IR based paper towel dispensers because the IR sensors never work right, and as rain forest killing as it might be, I do prefer paper towels. My favorite is the folded, interleaved towels that simply hang down from the dispenser such that you can grab a towel or two without ever touching anything other than the towel.
The building that houses my new job has the most modern bathrooms I've seen recently. IR toilet sensors, IR faucets, even IR soap dispensers, (that actually work!), and my favorite interleaved paper towels.
So I was surpised to find a new innovation there - flushless urinals. Basically, these are just bowls mounted on the wall with drains at the bottom. And they got me to thinking... why flush urinals at all? I mean, if flushless urinals work, then why have we been flushing them for decades? And if they don't work, then why are they installed here? Who decided that urinals needed to be flushed at all? And why? Was it just superstition? Or did they actually run into some problem in the past with flushless urinals, some problem I can't quite fathom, which has now, through the wonder of modern technology, been circumvented?
Think about it. If water is used to flush the dirt off your hands and down the sink drain, then why don't we have something to flush the water off our hands and down the sink drain? Are those electric hand dryers a form of flusing the water off our hands? Why is it that we think of hands which have been water flushed and then hot air flushed as "cleaner" than, say, hands which have been flushed with sand? Or with that chemical they use for "dry" cleaning?
In any case, these were the thoughts that went through my mind as I availed myself of these modern conveniences for the first week. And then of the sole remaining urinal as the first was marked "out of service" by a garbage bag covering it.
About the time the second urinal was covered with a garbage bag, it began to occur to me that perhaps there had been no technology improvement whatsoever and that maybe these things didn't work after all.
In any case, I'm fascinated. I can't guess what the failure mode might be for a flushless urinal. But the fact that they've both been out of service for a few weeks now seems mighty suspicious.
Thu, November 29, 2007 - 9:22 AM
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When the IR sensors work, I really like this stuff because it means I don't have to touch the icky plumbing. I don't much like the IR based paper towel dispensers because the IR sensors never work right, and as rain forest killing as it might be, I do prefer paper towels. My favorite is the folded, interleaved towels that simply hang down from the dispenser such that you can grab a towel or two without ever touching anything other than the towel.
The building that houses my new job has the most modern bathrooms I've seen recently. IR toilet sensors, IR faucets, even IR soap dispensers, (that actually work!), and my favorite interleaved paper towels.
So I was surpised to find a new innovation there - flushless urinals. Basically, these are just bowls mounted on the wall with drains at the bottom. And they got me to thinking... why flush urinals at all? I mean, if flushless urinals work, then why have we been flushing them for decades? And if they don't work, then why are they installed here? Who decided that urinals needed to be flushed at all? And why? Was it just superstition? Or did they actually run into some problem in the past with flushless urinals, some problem I can't quite fathom, which has now, through the wonder of modern technology, been circumvented?
Think about it. If water is used to flush the dirt off your hands and down the sink drain, then why don't we have something to flush the water off our hands and down the sink drain? Are those electric hand dryers a form of flusing the water off our hands? Why is it that we think of hands which have been water flushed and then hot air flushed as "cleaner" than, say, hands which have been flushed with sand? Or with that chemical they use for "dry" cleaning?
In any case, these were the thoughts that went through my mind as I availed myself of these modern conveniences for the first week. And then of the sole remaining urinal as the first was marked "out of service" by a garbage bag covering it.
About the time the second urinal was covered with a garbage bag, it began to occur to me that perhaps there had been no technology improvement whatsoever and that maybe these things didn't work after all.
In any case, I'm fascinated. I can't guess what the failure mode might be for a flushless urinal. But the fact that they've both been out of service for a few weeks now seems mighty suspicious.
