And why do Americans keep using that kind of toilets with high water level and soft flushing that tend to get clogged?
I mean, in my 37 years of life in Europe I haven't ever clogged a toilet, I don't think it's even a thing, at least if you don't throw anything that doesn't belong in there. But in my trips to America... I'm not going to be specific, but let's just say that some experiences have made me very cautious when I use the toilet there.
Yeah, I totally get what you're hinting at ;-) I stopped counting the number of times that I clogged American toilets with...let's say "substances that clearly belong in there". Seriously, am I supposed to hold it in the middle of the action and flush?
Another really, really backwards thing seems to be shower fixtures. If you aren't lucky and find a modern mixing valve, you are likely doomed to experiment with various push, pull, turn-while-pull, push-while-turn-then-pull, turn-until-searing-hot-then-go-on-because-warm-comes-after-hot-on-the-scale moves to get a decent water temperature. And not only is this totally unintuitive, it also differs between every single shower in every single hotel or motel room (especially motels seem to have these weird fixtures).
It took me a long time to discover how some fixtures in hotels work in the US, because the idea that to get hot water you have to open up full-throttle (passing through cold) and there is no way to control the amount of water was totally alien to me. I never expected such a wasteful design.
Worst ones are (although not limited to America) ones where you have to reach under the water flow to get to the control.
Eg the knobs are on the inside wall of the shower facing the entrance. So to turn on the water you have to reach your arm and sometimes half the body across the shower. Then you have to turn the bloody thing past cold full blast, with the cold water coming down on you. And to add to it, you can’t really tell where you set the temperature to unless you feel the water. If the temperature is wrong you have to reach through the water stream again to change it. Annoying if you set it too cold, good luck if you set it too hot.
Yeah, those are the greatest. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can pull on the fixture to control the flow rate, but on others you are basically limited to full throttle if you don't want to shower with cold water only.
Modern thermostat mixer valves are fantastic. I will not tolerate a shower without one and am baffled every time I see a shower without one. They're much easier to use, more comfortable, and it saves water, because you're wasting less time fiddling with the taps and waiting for the right temperature.
In the spectrum from (what I consider European) thermostatic valves through pressure-balance valves down to simple, static gate valves, the problem is often that retrofitting from one to a better type involves plumbing changes in the wall (necessitating re-tiling in a lot of cases, which cannot be done cheaply to look "never been disturbed").
For a house built in the 60s, it can be a mid-four-figure job all-in just to change the shower valve type. For several grand, I can manually change the valve and adjust it when someone flushes a toilet or runs the hot tap somewhere else.
That's not without health risks. As a life-long skin problem bearer it's a thing that has messed me up more than once. The upper layers of your skin get de-greased like that and that in turn can cause all kinds of issues. Better get him to understand the possible consequences before there is actual damage from this.
Especially during winter the effects can be quite harsh.
And not only that, but every time you turn the water off to soap yourself up, the temperature resets so you have to freeze and burn all over again! Pretty terrible design.
I know, but how do you soap up with the water running? You're just wasting soap and water by rinsing it off immediately as you apply it. I've never managed to have a good shower in the US.
Sometimes I’m not sure how much of our habits can be attributed to cheap utility prices and how much can be attributed to differences in environmental opinion.
And for a serious answer, our cisterns usually have two buttons, one which uses 30% of the cistern (for light flushing) and one which uses 100% of it (for heavy flushing).
This is only possible in the low-water European toilets, obviously, US-style toilets where the water is already filling the bowl can't do this.
The half-flush simply empties the bowl and refills it, the full-flush crashes a full tank of water on top of it and flushes it all (which is how American toilets typically flush).
Ahh, I see, I didn't realize they used more water than a single fill, though now that you mention it it's kind of obvious, since they fill to the brim when they clog.
You aim the shower head so it doesn’t spray water at you. This is a lot easier in a tub+shower than it is in a pure shower due to the extra room offered.
I scrub the front of my body while the shower is rinsing down my back and when I turn around to rinse the front of my body, I scrub my back. This also keeps me warm and comfortable.
>Groundwater 47°F, Heater set to 110°F: 63° rise x 8.33 Btu x 40 gallons = 20,992 Btus
>Groundwater 47°F, Heater set to 120°F: 73° rise x 8.33 Btu x 40 gallons = 24,324 Btus
>Groundwater 47°F, Heater set to 140°F: 93° rise x 8.33 Btu x 40 gallons = 30,988 Btus
Average of 25,435 Btus.
0.000293 kWh/Btu for electric so something like 0.19 kWh per gallon for electric.
Looks like 1lb of coal makes about 1kWh (wow!)[1].
1 pound of carbon combines with 2.667 pounds of oxygen to produce 3.667 pounds of carbon dioxide.
So roughly 0.7 pounds or 0.32 kilograms of CO2 per gallon of water in an electric water heater?
The average American shower uses 17.2 gallons [2], so if you showered daily and only used hot water your CO2 from showers alone would very roughly be something like 2000kg annually.
That's an interesting question, but I think it's a bit moot; we don't have any leeway in the form of amount that's safe to emit. Anything we can save, we should save.
Most step out of the water and leave it flowing. I install a flow control valve (aka "water saver") behind the shower head which lets you take a "Navy Shower" where you lather up without the water spraying.
Yeah, this is something that I'm vaguely surprised by every time I'm in the US; the thermostatic mixing valve seems to be considered magical future technology. They definitely _exist_ there, but you tend not to find them in hotels.
I replaced every single one of mine with a Toto. I don’t care if it’s four times the price of American Standard or whatever: I have literally never had to use the plunger since.
As a counter anecdote, I’m an American living in Australia, and I own and have used a toilet plunger in Australia because my Australian toilet was clogged. But that is a single occurrence in 12 years as opposed to multiple occurrences annually in the States.
The only time I’ve had anything close to a clog, it was as a young teenager and because of excessive quantities of toilet paper. And the solution was just to add more water into the bowl, which increased the water pressure in the s-trap and pushed the blockage through.
Really it should be impossible to clog a toilet with poops alone.
And if you find yourself excreting an unusual amount in one sitting, or need to use an unusual quantity of paper, just do an intermediate flush.
In the US, they're for sale everywhere. And I must acknowledge their ingenuity when it comes to toilet plunger design: American plungers have an additional "lip" at the bottom of the rubber thingy that fits into their toilets quite nicely and seals them up better than the usual plungers in Europe would do, which don't have that extra rubber lip.
Apparently the extraordinary demand for plungers resulted in better plungers, not in someone asking "why the heck are we so reliant on plungers?" and possibly making better toilets ;-)
I think the ship has sailed on better toilets in America, unfortunately. A big part of the problem is just that the standard waste pipe is too small AIUI.
I just moved into an apartment with a Toto toilet and it replaced the plunger with toilet brush...
I've needed a plunger once in the last 2 years of apartments (didn't even get around go buying one at my last one before I left)
I need that toilet brush every other day, it's a really gross problem, and I hate the idea of having guests and them having to choose between leaving a dirty bowl and whipping out my toilet brush...
Although the design and expectation is the same in my native Britain as most of the rest of Europe, I've only seen signs like this in France and Germany [1] -- usually in quieter public buildings, like government offices.
I have the Toto Drake II line and they all combine a self-cleaning design with some sort of non-stock coating which they say lasts forever as long as you keep away from harsh cleaner compounds and only use the nylon bristle brushes. But who knows what the previous inhabitants used in your case.
I replaced the first one in 2015 and haven’t had any issues yet.
Pro-tip: the actual first thing I do when any family members or myself move into a new home or apartment is install a kitchen side spray in the bathroom as a hand-held “point and shoot” bidet. Those can be used to quickly clean in a contact-free way.
American toilets essentially suck water, pulling everything with it. Euro toilets just dump water from above. The disadvantage of Euro toilets is that they become dirty, which is why there's always a brush nearby. Also having that step with all your poop on it just sitting there is unpleasant, at least to me.
> Also having that step with all your poop on it just sitting there is unpleasant, at least to me.
That's wildly exaggerating it. Normally the brush isn't really dirty and you can soak it in soapy water every couple of weeks/months and you are fine. The water pressure seems higher in Europe (or at least in Germany, where I lived before moving to the US). After you cleaned the toilet, you would normally still be able to clean the brush off with the water of the current flush (should that be needed).
In fact, I find it bewildering that there is normally no brush in the US. It is unavoidable for almost all toilet types to get dirty and I find it frustrating if I can't leave the toilet how I would like to find it (clean), because there are still traces clearly visible in the toilet and no brush is available. Especially when I am visiting somewhere or we rent a vacation house with friends. Really awkward to see traces in the toilet of people who were in there before you (or the other way around).
I’ve never seen pressurized tanks in Europe. They flush from a tank that isn’t directly connected to the water mains, so
water pressure in the water mains doesn’t play a role. The water just falls down from the cistern to the bowl, a height difference of about half a meter for modern designs and up to 2 meters for more traditional designs.
Wikipedia says “it has been found by ceramic engineers that improved waterway design is a more effective way to enhance the bowl's flushing action than high tank mounting.“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet#Flush_tanks)
Hah so true. Having lived mainly in Europe and Australia I have never once managed to clog a toilet but without fail I seem to manage to clog almost every US hotel toilet. We're not talking about a few unlucky incidents but many.
Just on the general topic of the number of bathrooms increasing surely it could be related to the obesity epidemic. They do seem correlated. People getting fatter and fatter every year, they need to relieve themselves more often and of more material, this all takes time so it goes without saying they would spend more time in bathrooms.
Much of the smell in a toilet is your butt, not the bowl. If smell is an issue, wipe sooner or do an intermediate flush. (Or take the hint and change your diet.)
I must say that I find it oddly satisfying to flush down poop from such a shelf. Especially if it goes down just fine every single time and doesn't clog.
I live in Europe (Netherland) and regularly clog toilets. I don't know if my colon is unusually big, but in my experience, both deep and flat flushers are quite capable of getting clogged, though deep flushers seem more vulnerable to it than flat flushers. I suspect that with deep flushers, it may help to flush immediately and not let the turd soak up water while you add more toilet paper.
Seems you visit some places with poor plumbing then.
In my 40 years of life in the US the only time I have experienced a clogged toilet is because someone put something down it that did not belong (or the entire plumbing system was backed up do to tree roots or other issue unrelated to toilet design)
I mean, in my 37 years of life in Europe I haven't ever clogged a toilet, I don't think it's even a thing, at least if you don't throw anything that doesn't belong in there. But in my trips to America... I'm not going to be specific, but let's just say that some experiences have made me very cautious when I use the toilet there.