Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - From tornado flushes to remote controls, modern toilets are flush with tech - This Old Toilet 800-658-4521

Smart phones, smart homes, smart cars — everything in your life is getting increasingly more intelligent. And that includes our bathrooms; faucets, mirrors, and toilets are getting connected. That’s right, the loo, the WC, the John — the thing you spend a fair amount of time up-close and personal with daily, whether performing bodily functions or catching up with Facebook. But for a technology that’s hundreds of years old, with seemingly no changes since it was invented in the 16th century, does the toilet now need fixing?

Actually, our porcelain gods have been upgrading themselves all along — it’s just that you haven’t been paying attention. After all, nobody really stick their head into the toilet to see what’s new. Since Sir John Harrington invented the first flush toilet 1596, the fundamental technology has remained the same, but the throne itself has gone through a few iterations. Today, the most high-tech of toilets can cleanse themselves (and the humans that sit on them), play music, prevent bacterial build-up, and flush minimal amount of water. Oh, and get your Bluetooth ready — they are becoming another node in the Internet of Things. Here’s a look at the smart toilets of today, and where they are going in the future.

ONLY IN JAPAN

Perhaps the company most associated with smart toilets is the Japanese manufacturer of plumbing fixtures, Toto. Walk into its Manhattan showcase gallery and you’ll be startled by the rows of pristinely white toilets lifting their lids in unison as they sense you coming. This otherworldly greeting is not just a cool feature, but a hygienic one: no need to touch the lid.

Sit down, and you’ll realize the seat warms up to your body temperature. And while there’s an obligatory roll of toilet paper on the wall, it’s not really needed. Toto’s famous Washlet will wash your behind and then blow warm air on it — to dry you off.  You are, however, in full control of that cleansing operation: You can select your water streaming angles, pressure, temperature, and other options from the silvery remote controls conveniently placed on the wall. The abundance of options may be slightly overwhelming at first, but worry not: getting toilet trained in the 21st century is pretty pampering.

Eliminating use of toilet paper and wet wipes isn’t only eco-friendly and safer for municipality sewers, it’s also critically important for the elderly or the injured. If your mobility and dexterity are limited due to illness, surgery, or age, the self-wiping maneuver can be quite challenging, if not impossible. Toto takes that function very seriously: The company’s toilet testers actually wear special restrictive bodysuits to mimic the mobility loss, in order to perfect the toilet designs and operations accordingly.

Toilets have been getting smarter — it’s just that you haven’t been paying attention.

More novelties are coming down the pipe. If you noticed, the water in your regular toilet typically flushes down from underneath the rim — that overhanging circular ring underneath which you have to periodically scrub. Sometimes that rim flush cleanses the bowl fully, and sometimes you must reach for the brush and destroy the evidence that stuck. Toto’s latest tech all but eliminates that annoying act. With Tornado Flush, the water is injected into the bowl through powerful nozzles that create a centrifugal rinse in which the water spins around the bowl multiple times, taking every bit of waste with it.

“The water circumnavigates the bowl, which improves cleaning,” explains Bill Strang, engineer and president of operations at Toto USA. It also reduces the amount of water used. With the older tech, every drop of water cleaned only four to five inches of the shiny porcelain surface. With the tornado action droplets scrub 18 inches each.

But the magic doesn’t end there. After cleaning you, the toilet also cleans itself. After each use, it sprays its bowl with electrolyzed water, created by a built-in pair of electrodes.

“Electrolyzed water becomes reactive,” Strang explains — and dissolves any organic matter that may have stuck to the surface. “So you have a clean bowl in the next visit, no matter what occurred in the previous visit.”

TOTO

Overkill? Not if you consider the Japanese’s obsession with good hygiene and germ fighting. On the streets of Tokyo or anywhere in Japan, for that matter, people wearing masks to avoid spreading germs is a common sight. This ideology flows to Japanese toilets where tech isn’t used just for convenience, but to create a healthy lifestyle.

Toto is the world’s larger maker of toilets, but it also makes other high-end bath fixtures. Read about its new Flotation Tub.

COMING TO AMERICA

Toto’s Washlet, used all over Japan — from luxury hotels to fast-food restaurants — has been available for several decades, but in America its adoption has been slow. Asian and European countries tend to lead the way while we, apparently, lag behind on new home tech, and on loo innovations in particular.

But in the past few years, manufacturers are seeing increased interest in toilet upgrades. According to Kohler, the American bathroom equipment manufacturer, 83 percent of Americans want better toilet experiences in terms of cleaner feels and better smells, and 67 percent think bidets would help with that.

According to Kohler, 83 percent of Americans want better toilet experiences.

Part of it is that people are traveling more and seeing other options, says Kohler’s principal engineer Dan Halloran. Nearly 44 percent of travelers have used a bidet, and even many of those who don’t travel much have heard of the bidet concept.

American consumers and home builders may have been somewhat behind on their bathroom novelties, but U.S. manufacturers have not. Kohler’s latest model, NuMi, a slick ultra-modern toilet can tell your gender by the way you stand up to it, which then lifts the seat accordingly. Equipped with a cleansing seat, it comes with a compact, phone-size remote control that adjusts water and warm air options. It also connects to your phone via Bluetooth and can play music. Whether you’re into the classics or hip-hop you can answer your nature calls to your favorite tunes. Although dancing on your throne may be a bit messy.

Kohler’s latest models also feature smart flushing methods, such as Revolution360, in which the water does circular rinsing similar to Toto’s Tornado Flush, rather than simply sliding down the sides. Another tech, part of the Corbelle model, is AquaPiston, a patented solution that uses the hydrodynamic properties of water to create a powerful flush without added force or pressure. Halloran says that the team took their inspiration from waterfalls.

“If you look at a waterfall, you’ll see that water has a natural cascading arch,” Halloran explains. “There’s a natural arch of flow inside of a toilet tank also, and we matched it with the shape of our valves.”

KEEPING IT CLEAN

Optimizing cleaning is a big focus in general. Pouring loads of harsh chemicals into the toilet harms wildlife. Crawling on all four around the ivory thrones to dust off their awkwardly shaped pedestals annoys humans. Today, people have neither the time nor desire to give cleaning much thought. It has to be easy and convenient.

The manufacturers have taken note. The new models feature the so-called “skirted” designs that make exterior cleaning easy. The bowls’ round or square bodies hide the toilet pipes or “guts” within them. The “skirts” extend down to the floor and eliminate the need to stick your head or duster underneath the porcelain curves.

Kohler continuous clean toilet Kohler

Keeping the bowl’s interior squeaky clean is harder. After all, it interacts with much yuckier substances. Kohler uses the Continuous Clean coat, which rinses a bowl with a cleaning solution after each use.

Ever dropped those cleaning tablets into your toilet tank to get rid of the nasty brown build-up?

“You forgo your manufacturer’s warranty when you do that,” says Victoria Hafenstein, Kohler’s public relations specialist, because the chemicals not only destroy bacteria but also chip away at the flushing mechanism inside. So Kohler designed a separate interior chamber where continuous cleaning tablets can reside safely.

”[Smart toilets] could gather your key metrics, and perhaps submit them to your medical provider to diagnose a problem.”

Toto solves that problem in an eco-friendly way, by coating the bowl’s surface with a special titanium dioxide glaze that has hydrophilic and photocatalytic properties. Sounds too tongue-twisting for a toilet? It’s also quite powerful. Hydrophilic surfaces attract water droplets rather than letting them bounce over — to scrape off the residue material more efficiently. Photocatalytic means that, when activated by an ultraviolet light, the surface layer can destroy the bacterial build-up. Where does the UV light come from? It’s built into the toilet, of course.

“It turns on once a day, typically at night and shines for about 20 minutes,” Toto’s Strang says — as another self-cleaning action. (It also gives the saying, “where the light doesn’t shine” a whole new meaning.)

TOTO Washlet

How much would it cost to equip your house with a smart john? The prices vary.  Kohler’s basic cleansing seat can be installed on any toilet for a mere $169, but it won’t feature warm water or convenient button controls — although they can be added for a few extra bucks. The NuMi costs $7,500.00. Toto’s latest Washlet model, the Neorest 750H, lists for $10,200, and has all the aforementioned Toto tech. But for the budget minded, you can purchase a basic Washlet add-on seat starting at $500.

These are premium products, however; if demand for smart toilets increase, expect more options and lower prices.

Short on time? Here’s how to “fake clean” a bathroom.

TOILETS AS HEALTH CENTERS

The really smart future toilets may also be able to monitor your health. Urine and excrement are excellent substances for measuring your metabolites, infections, sugar levels, intestinal microbiome and even some cancer precursors. Toto demonstrated these capabilities in its Intelligence-series of smart toilets, which was only available in Japan in limited quantities.

Unfortunately, this ultra smart tech won’t hit the stores any time soon because diagnostic equipment must undergo a rigorous and lengthy approval process by regulatory agencies in many countries. But conceptually, such capabilities can certainly be built, experts say.

TOTO

“There’s an opportunity to gather your key metrics and have a dashboard that allow you to see how these metrics change, and perhaps submit them to your medical provider to diagnose a problem,” Kohler’s Halloran says. He likens the concept to FitBit that can gather your vitals to help you make better decisions about your wellbeing. At some point, the future toilets might join that monitoring paradigm too.

We wouldn’t be surprised if a voice assistant also gets implemented. Forget to flush the toilet? Imagine asking Alexa to do it on your phone, as you dash out the door.

source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/the-modern-toilet-in-our-homes-and-businesses-have-evolved/

by Lina Zeldovich

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Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - Engineering a better toilet could save millions of lives - This Old Toilet 800-658-4521

A place for reflection.

Deposit Photos

Most Americans don’t give the porcelain throne much thought. Do your business, flush, and get off the pot. But for billions of people around the world, toilets are a major source of anxiety, illness, and economic hardship.

“In developing regions, [sanitation] infrastructure does not exist so toilets are not emptied safely and human waste comes into contact with people,” Duke University engineering professor Jeffrey Glass told PopSci via email. Americans, by and large, rely on a functionally invisible sewage system and off-site wastewater treatment plant managed by a municipal sanitation department to safely process their poop. Elsewhere, the detrius flows a little more freely. “Thus pathogens make their way into the drinking water and water used for everyday household chores like cleaning.”

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These leaky industrial bowels have serious consequences for human health. Pathogens from fecal matter include cholera-causing bacteria; rotavirus, which causes stomach flu; Shigella, the micro-invader responsible for dysentery; and even parasitic worms eager to colonize a new human host. Each year, 500,000 or more children under 5 die from such diseases. And adults aren’t safe either: the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate 9 percent of the world’s total disease burden stems from poor sanitation and contaminated drinking water.

But Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and world’s most prominent philanthropist, announced that an international network of technologists, sanitation experts, and development workers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have finally cracked the international crapper crisis. The private organization, which prides itself on its public health initiatives, decided to disrupt the bathroom back in 2011. Foundation staff reached out to engineering firms from far-flung fields, encouraging them—with grant money and the potential for lucrative altruism—to develop a self-contained, germ-killing machine.

At a foundation-backed Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing this week, Gates took the stage with a helpful visual aid: a mason jar full of poop. “This expo showcases, for the first time, radically new, decentralized sanitation technologies and products that are business-ready,” he said. “It’s no longer a question of if we can reinvent the toilet and other sanitation systems. It’s a question of how quickly this new category of off-grid solutions will scale.” According to a press release, the foundation is invested in 20 toilet technologies it now deems ready for widespread use.

Sedron Technologies, a small engineering firm in Sedro-Woolley, Washington about an hour and 15 minutes from the foundation’s headquarters in downtown Seattle, answered the call. The company pivoted from two decades in aerospace engineering with companies like Boeing and Lockheed to sanitation. “It was quite the switch,” says Sara VanTassel, Sedron's president. Just six years later, the firm's gamble is paying off: its Omni Processor is the centerpiece of Gates’ Beijing celebration.

Senegalese workers extracting waste from a storage unit in a household courtyard.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The machine, which is about the size of four ocean shipping containers set side-by-side, combines three existing technologies in one closed-looped system. It starts with solid fuel combustion, where solid waste is separated from liquid waste, mechanically dried, and set aflame. The resulting heat boils water, generating steam power to keep the whole system running. The third and final process, water treatment, runs in parallel to combustion and steam-creation. Liquid waste diverted from the dryer earlier in the process is filtered and condensed, producing potable water.

The self-sufficient system doesn’t use outside energy, but it produces plenty That excess electricity can be fed into the community. “It’s really combining a lot of standard processes that we’re very familiar with, we’ve just done it much more efficiently,” VanTassel says. She estimates first machines will be able to filter water for a community of about 200,000 to 500,000 people.

Since the dawn of human civilization, we’ve struggled to contain our collective waste. For millennia, the majority of people squatted over holes or pots; sometimes, the solid “night soil” was used in agriculture. More often, it was funneled into nearby rivers and oceans, where it could easily cause disease. The miraculous flush toilet emerged in Tudor England, just a few hundred years ago. It has maintained its shape, structure, and reliance on a sewer network since the 1780s. When paired with well-maintained septic tanks or, more commonly, sewage pipes, the age-old problems of pooping disappeared for residents of wealthy countries, who now buy lavatory accoutrements, like heated seats and in-bowl bidets with different speeds and water temperatures.

Inventing an entirely new system required some creative thinking, and proposals to the Gates Foundation were diverse. Pathogens can be killed in three ways: chemicals, biological elements like excrement-eating bacteria, or heat. Engineers pursued all three paths. Add in the stipulation each system be entirely self-sufficient, and toilet seats suddenly look a lot more like a porcelain Rubik’s cube. “For example, one technology may be very effective at disinfection but is only cost effective in large batches so it should be used at the neighborhood and beyond level rather than single household,” Glass says. “Another may be very cost effective but requires electrical power so cannot be used where there is no power grid.”

A man transports human waste for composting.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

In the last seven years, the foundation has put $200 million into reinventing the toilet, and Gates announced in Beijing he’ll be dedicating $200 million more. But there are challenges ahead. The New York Times reports, for example, that many of the models on display at the expo are $10,000. That price needs to plummet—to, say, $500—if this plumbing is to be commercially viable. And there’s also a question of whether the communities these devices were built for actually want to install an Omni Processor or Sedron’s forthcoming Firelight toilet.

“I do think there’s still going to be a huge curve with commercialization,” she says. There’s inherent risk in trying something new, so Sedron is reliant on need early adopters eager for innovation. “Sanitation has really been a government responsibility in some senses and done in a very centralized fashion,” she says. That’s why the Gates Foundation “hasn’t just funded technology development, they’re also really trying to transform the thought process of sanitation into these ”decentralized solutions.

source: https://www.popsci.com/engineering-better-toilet#page-3

by Eleanor Cummins

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Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - A short history of toilets at 35,000 feet – what really happens when you flush a plane loo? - This Old Toilet 800-658-4521

Unless you’ve flown first class, or in a private jet, aircraft loos are windowless, cramped affairs that usually reek of cheap sanitizer. But they have come a long way – and rarely get the recognition they deserve.

The first flight (made by Orville Wright, although some conspiracy theorists think otherwise – more on that here), explains Aviation Global News, lasted just 12 seconds – “hardly long enough to get worked up from a bladder perspective, although one may surmise that a number two might have been on his mind”.

But before long, planes were flying for much longer. “It is obvious that someone, somewhere, was the first person to relieve themselves in an aircraft. Who was this urinary pioneer? – history does not record,” laments the website.

Some interesting facts have been recorded, however. Second World War pilots, for example, couldn’t stand the “slop bucket” loos – or “Elsans” – found on board Lancaster bombers. They often overflowed in turbulent conditions, or were tricky to use.

One unidentified airman described his hatred for the contraptions: “While we were flying in rough air, this devil’s convenience often shared its contents with the floor of the aircraft, the walls, the ceiling, and sometimes a bit remained in the container itself.

Hello darkness, my old friend Credit: istock

“It doesn't take much imagination to picture what it was like trying to combat fear and airsickness while struggling to remove enough gear in cramped quarters and at the same time trying to use the bloody Elsan… This loathsome creation invariably overflowed on long trips and in turbulence was always prone to bathe the nether regions of the user. It was one of the true reminders to me that war is hell.”

Airmen sometimes preferred to urinate or defecate into containers, before simply hurling their business out of a window. Some reputedly jettisoned full Elsan toilets on German targets along with their bombs – an early example of biological warfare.

James Kemper’s modern vacuum toilet wasn’t patented until the Seventies, with the first one installed by Boeing in 1982. Before that, plane loos were unwieldy boxes that utilised large quantities of blue liquid known as “Skykem” and were prone to leaking. So next time you’re queuing to use the facilities at 35,000 feet, count yourself lucky.

Kemper’s nifty device uses a little liquid, but relies on non-stick coating and vacuum suction to wash away the nastiness. The video below shows just how efficiently the vacuum works.

“The person in this video is just stupid, immature, inconsiderate, and has no life,” comments one YouTube user, beneath the clip. “I am definitely doing this on my next flight.” Quite.

Since then, there have not really been any dramatic advances in aircraft toilet technology – if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The only noteworthy item is that the toilets on Boeing's 787 Dreamliners have automatically closing lids. Oh, and some toilets are getting smaller to really cram in those paying customers.

So what does happen to all that waste? Is it jettisoned into the sky? To all those fliers who make a point of holding it in until the plane reaches European soil, prepare to be sorely disappointed.

“There is no way to jettison the contents of the lavatories during a flight,” explains Patrick Smith, a pilot and author of Cockpit Confidential, a book about air travel. “At the end of a flight, the blue fluid, along with your contributions to it, are vacuumed into a tank on the back of a truck. (The truck driver’s job is even lousier than the co-pilot’s, but it pays better.)

“The driver then wheels around to the back of the airport and furtively offloads the waste in a ditch behind a parking lot... Just kidding. In truth I don’t know what he does with it. Time to start a new urban legend.”

There is one caveat, however. It is impossible to empty passengers' waste from an aircraft intentionally, but not by mistake.

“A man in California once won a lawsuit after pieces of blue ice fell from a plane and came crashing through the skylight of his sailboat,” added Captain Smith. “A leak, extending from a toilet’s exterior nozzle fitting, caused runoff to freeze, build, and then drop like a neon ice bomb. If you think that’s bad, a 727 once suffered an engine separation after ingesting a frozen chunk of its own leaked toilet waste, inspiring the line ‘when the s*** hits the turbofan.’”

source: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/really-happens-flush-plane-loo-150000867.html

by Oliver Smith

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