After years of having his idea for a glow in the dark toilet seat scoffed at, Dave Reynolds of Lebanon, Tennessee is the one having the last laugh.
“I kept telling this story over and over to people and they laughed,” Reynolds said during a recent TV interview, “and I said, ‘One day you’re not going to laugh at me. One day you’re going to go to the bathroom and think of me.’”
Mission accomplished.
As far as ideas go, a glow in the dark toilet seat isn’t actually that bad. Under regular lighting conditions, the toilet seat looks completely normal. Yet once darkness falls, the seat emits a soft glow in either green or blue, a feature which Reynolds believes is extremely beneficial for both children and the elderly. Specifically, Reynolds notes that parents have told him that their kids no longer need to wake them up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, all thanks to the warm, welcoming glow of his toilet seat.
“Not right now, but at 3 o’clock in the morning, that’s when it comes together,” Reynolds explains. “When you get up in the middle of the night, you forgot you installed it, and you turn the corner and you go, ‘whoa!'”
Given the annoying pain that can result from turning a light on in the middle of the night, Reynolds just might be onto something here. As it stands now, he’s already shipping about 20 toilet seats a day.
As for the quality of the product itself, Reynolds claims that the glow is the same “that’s used by the U.S. military and NASA.” Lastly, Reynolds boasts that the seats will glow for about 15-20 years.
Electronic toilets with push-button control panels, built-in bidets, seat warmers and even music or the sound of a babbling brook to accompany your "business" have long been popular across much of Asia. Now, the technology -- in a stripped-down form -- is growing in popularity in washrooms stateside.
They're called washlets, and they're basically bidets that install on top of a standard toilet. With a touch from a remote control, consumers can customize water pressure and settings for men and women.
Bennett Friedman, owner of the AF showroom for bath and kitchen architectural products in New York, says these upgraded bidets are in most bathrooms in Asia and now are catching on with a broad swath of the population in America.
"They've spread out to include more moderate income users as well," he told CBS News' Hena Daniels. "I think as the value and importance grows in their lives, people are beginning to embrace the concept."
American manufacturer Kohler says its washlets have seen yearly double-digit growth since 2011.
Japanese toilet maker Toto is also experiencing growing sales in the U.S. Toto's prices start at $350 but can go up to $7,000 depending on additional features, including feet warmers, a dryer and the ability to play music.
As Californians facing this historic drought together, we know water conservation is critical. We want to know what else we can do to save water. Fortunately, the governor’s executive order has given us a good starting point by rejecting extreme policy solutions and, instead, implementing commonsense and equitable water-use reduction actions, including a time-limited rebate program to help homeowners replace older, water-guzzling appliances with newer, more efficient models. It is this type of simple, but effective, solution that we as citizens and homeowners should embrace.
Policymakers should look at expanding and fully funding retrofit programs by using existing voter-approved water bonds to help homeowners make their appliances and fixtures as water efficient as possible. Doing so would create jobs, put taxpayer approved bond money to good use, and save billions of gallons of water annually.
As an industry that contributes more than $38.6 billion to California’s economy and supports more than 209,000 jobs, California builders have long recognized the importance of building energy-and-water efficient new homes and communities. It is time to apply the lessons learned and progress made on water efficiency in the new construction industry to older housing stock.
In 2011, California’s first-in-the-nation mandatory green building code went into effect, which the California Building Industry Association proudly supported. Today, a new single-family, three-bedroom home with four occupants uses about 46,000 gallons of water per year.
If single-family homes built prior to 2011 updated showerheads, faucets and toilets to meet the new code, we could save up to 233 billion gallons of water annually. This is equivalent to 6.5 percent of current reservoir capacity in California.
Fortunately, swapping out old showerheads, faucets and toilets for low-flow models is one of the most inexpensive of home water-use reductions. On average, the cost to replace a showerhead will run $50, a faucet $50, and a toilet, $250.
Gov. Jerry Brown has taken a concrete first step in instituting a short-termappliance rebate program debuting this summer through the California Energy Commission, the state Department of Water Resources and the State Water Resources Control Board that will provide monetary incentives to replace inefficient water-consuming devices. The California Building Industry Association applauds such a first step, but would also strongly support an expanded, long-term program that uses funds available from previous voter-approved water bonds to make sure every home in the state — at a minimum — has low-flow shower heads and toilets.
The governor has balanced the need for water conservation with doing no further harm to the economy. The building industry will follow his lead and stands as a proud partner to help policymakers find a path to make all homes in California more effective at conserving water.
IT may sound as if I’m exaggerating when I say that a high-tech, heated, warm-water-spraying bidet toilet seat ruined me for regular toilets, but I’m not. I don’t know how you guys do it. I look at your normal toilets, the ones with seats that are as cold as ice, the ones that don’t spray and buff your nethers with a soothing shower of cleansing H2O, and I shake my head. I look at your dry-wiping ways, and I wonder how your mom raised you. Don’t you want to be clean? Don’t you ever feel ... not so fresh?
“You don’t try to clean the rest of your body with a dry towel, right?” said Jerry Bougher, the marketing manager for toilet seats at Kohler, the plumbing fixtures company. Say you’re covered with mud, he said. “Will you clean yourself up with a bunch of paper? No, obviously, you’ll take a shower. It comes down to the same thing with this. Here in the United States we’ve used dry toilet paper to clean ourselves, and it doesn’t always do the job effectively. Cleaning with water is kind of like taking a shower. It’s just, you know, cleaner.”
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The Kohler Veil toilet a with C3 toilet seat.CreditKohler
This is the basic pitch for the electronic bidet toilet seat, a product that has been used widely around the world for decades, but has only lately been inching its way into the American market.
Better late than never, I say, because these things are glorious.
The seats, which range in price from about $250 to more than $1,700, are attachments for your toilet with at least two basic functions, and, depending on the model, a wide array of more luxurious extras.
The basic features are warming your bottom, and then cleaning it with warmed water. The more luxurious appointments try to recreate something like an opulent spa. Some seats will dry your bottom with warmed air, sort of like being pushed through a carwash. Some use a fan and a catalytic converter to suck out the gases in the bowl, apparently removing any odors. Some sense when you’re approaching the toilet and spray a fine mist in the bowl, prelubricating it to aid with flushing. Many of the seats, as you might expect, offer a remote control to operate the spraying and other functions
But a lot of these extras are unnecessary, because even the basic electronic bidet seat feels luxurious — and once you start using one, you’ll never want a toilet without it.
I first fell for the heated bidet seat two years ago at a hotel in the Colorado mountains. It was a Washlet made by Toto, the Japanese plumbing company that introduced its own in the 1980s. After using it once — the pillowy warm seat, the personal shower, the sensation of feeling completely refreshed — I didn’t want to leave the bathroom.
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A Kohler toilet seat with bidet functionality and touchscreen controls.CreditKohler
I wondered how anyone could live without one, and I immediately plunked down $350 for a Washlet of my own. Since then, I’ve also purchased a $250 bidet seat made by Brondell for my other bathroom. Both have been well worth the price. They were a breeze to install (if you have modern plumbing and a nearby electrical outlet, the only tool you’ll need is a wrench), and, next to my smartphone, they’ve become my favorite can’t-do-without technology.
of national prosperity. About 76 percent of households have a washlet (Toto’s brand is often used as the generic name). Manufacturers say the devices are used widely in other parts of Asia, too, as well as in the Middle East and, increasingly, in Europe, where they’ve disrupted the market for old-school, toilet-adjacent bidets.
Jason Fitzsimmons, the vice president for sales of Toto USA, said that the bidet seat’s introduction in Japan “was the perfect match of technology, culture, personal hygiene and bathing habits.” The Japanese, like many people across Asia and the Middle East, were of the justifiable view that when you go, you ought to use water. After their rise in Japan, bidet seats spread across neighboring parts of Asia for a more basic reason, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “Toilet paper was not easily available and seen as the ultimate in luxury — and even when you did have it, the quality of the toilet paper was low,” he said.
But when Toto brought the Washlet to the United States in the early 1990s, the company hit a wall. “People weren’t culturally prepared to discuss the features and the benefits of it from a hygiene perspective,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “So, we struggled mightily.”
Lately, though, manufacturers have managed to put the past behind them. Though the market in the United States is still tiny compared with the rest of the world, Mr. Fitzsimmons said that Toto’s Washlet sales have grown by 20 percent annually in each of the last five years. Mr. Bougher, of Kohler, said that his company’s sales had also been increasing. The company makes several models.
The companies attribute the increase to a growing cultural acceptance of discussing how we wipe — spurred, in part, by marketing from the toilet paper industry — and because bidet seats have some environmental benefits. (You’ll use less toilet paper, and toilet paper takes a lot of trees to make.)
But perhaps the main reason that bidet seat sales are on the rise is that, after you try one, you can’t turn back. “Yeah, there are people who think it’s weird,” said Kyle Bazylo, who runs the bidet sales site Bidet.org. But Mr. Bazylo is so confident that you’ll change your mind after trying one that he recently introduced a money-back guarantee.
“If you send it back, I can’t resell it. I’ve got to throw it in the garbage,” he said. “But when people try it, they’ll fall in love with it.”
In a surprise move in the high-altitude game of thrones, Zodiac Aerospace has developed the Swiss Army Knife of aircraft toilets–destined to forever revolutionize the plane lavatory.
While a lot of high-level thinking goes into designing the perfect aircraft seat, and the customer-facing parts of lavatories have gotten some attention from designers, underneath the pretty composite frames, the toilet itself has had no love.
As we learned from Zodiac at the Aircraft Interiors Expo, aircraft mechanics have paid the price for this lack of innovation. But no more.
The Revolution is so radical a departure from conventional aircraft toilets that mechanics can service the unit in twenty-seconds—blindfolded. Seriously. We watched with our own eyes as an eager representative donned a googly-eyed sleeping mask to take the whole thing apart then put it all back together in half the time it took us to wonder why a googly-eyed sleeping mask was required. The results impressed us.
The primary goal of aircraft mechanics who have to service a toilet is getting out of there as soon as possible. But taking out a whole aircraft toilet takes time. Traditional units are large assembly parts which come in a right-hand or left-hand pipe version. This means airlines have to keep extra inventory on their shelves since they can’t guess which type of pipe will break first. Because traditional units are a full assemblies, mechanics have to take the whole toilet out—even for something as minor as a scratch on the bowl.
It’s a difficult and unpleasant task, performed in a tight space where fresh air is at a premium, and it’s far more work than it otta be.
The Revolution ends the tyranny of the traditional toilet. It consists of a number of interchangeable sub-assembly parts–and the pipe is reversible. This way, airlines only have to keep the subassemblies on their shelves, all parts fit all toilets, and mechanics only need to quickly replace the offending part.
But that’s not all. The very best part of the Revolution, in our view, is the bowl. Traditional aircraft toilet bowls are stainless steel coated in Teflon (the things you learn!). Over time, the same thing happens to the Teflon on those toilets as the Teflon coating on your pans at home. With enough use, the situation gets sticky.
Zodiac has done away with the Teflon-coated stainless steel bowl and replaced it with a new composite. “Our new bowl is made out of a material which has similar or higher lubricity to the current Teflon and can offer up to a 30% weight savings from the traditional stainless steel bowl,” Zodiac explains. Love that word ‘lubricity’. Anyway, that’s a thing you want.
For passengers, this means a more reliable, well-maintained, and clean toilet. For airlines, it’s a cost-savings. But for aircraft mechanics, this is a brave new world where the most unpleasant task imaginable becomes significantly less yucky. Revolution indeed.
