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New urinal designs
- upghost 2y agoThey should've called it the Tesla Cyberinal.
- margalabargala 2y agoNot patentable, there's prior art of blocky, angular Tesla brand products that people pee on.
- jwr 2y agoMost urinals in Japan look like the "Nautilus" design already.
- s0rce 2y agoI haven't been to Japan and just looked at some photos and it seems they are different than the design proposed in the paper. The paper shows a much more angular "V" shaped cross-section with steep sides ending in a point vs a rounded back where splashes occur.
- zabzonk 2y agoPut a grill drain in the floor under the porcelain as the Victorians did.
- schneems 2y agoPee drains still smell bad and require extra cost to plumb more drains. Nasty urinals are a compounding problem as the grosser the bathroom the further people stand from the urinal which means the aim is worse and the bathroom gets worse. You know the saying, an oz of prevention…
- potato3732842 2y agoYou already need bathroom floor drains in most commercial facility bathrooms because code. Might as well make it do something useful.
- zabzonk 2y agoYeah, I was meaning commercial, not home. Home, just sit down and manipulate your dong so it can't miss! Well, mostly.
- GiorgioG 2y agoCan I get one at home? Seriously - I just painted our bathroom and it's just disgusting how much splashing winds up splashing out of the bowl and onto other surfaces.
- fsckboy 2y agojust sit down. nobody will know, except your bathroom will be cleaner, you will be cleaning less and gfs will consider you more civilized. also, both hands free for phone.
- shipman05 2y agoYeah. I joined the sit-to-pee club after I started having to clean my own bathroom and toilet. It really is a win-win-win
- UberFly 2y agoAgreed. I have a wife and two daughters. Out of respect for them I sit (or camp hover) and thus they don't have to wade through my piss splatter. Even if I lived by myself I'd still do it for the sake of not wanting my pee all over my own bathroom.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago[flagged]
- jgyter 2y ago[flagged]
- BrenBarn 2y agoAppropriate that it was published in "PNAS Nexus".
- Thaxll 2y agoAfter 3 pints the design does not matter much...
- jppope 2y agocame here to say this... I'd wager more urine ends up on the floor due to accuracy than urinal design. Still... glad they are focused on some of life's most difficult problems
- amelius 2y agoYeah, but at that point your pee is beer.
- tyre 2y agobrother if you can’t drink three pints and still keep it in a urinal, you shouldn’t be drinking three pints. urinals are not small targets.
- wordofx 2y agoSince when is this a new design? Looks the same as a lot of existing designs.
- wileydragonfly 2y agoWe had that contemporary commercial in one office building, but it was slightly elongated. The splash back was horrific and unavoidable. Angle, distance, approach, absolutely nothing prevented it. It was so bad we finally had open conversations about it and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets. The struggle is real.
- potato3732842 2y agoAt my employer we have an emergency location (glorified office) that we basically never operate out of except one afternoon a quarter to prove we can. The documentation about how to operate out of that site includes a warning to that effect. Edit: Now that I think about it building has been remodeled so I should really have someone confirm if the warning is still valid.
- 0_____0 2y agoWhy would you need an emergency location? Not bashing just curious on the rationale
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- potato3732842 2y agoContractually required. Clients want assurance of continuity of business in case a meteor hits our office or an errant backhoe hits the fiber on our street. We use it for real about one day every 2-2.5yr. It's only enough space for the dozen key people we need to field urgent stuff. Previously we had clients required us cross train a handful of key employees on their specific stuff so they could acqui-hire those people to maintain their stuff in the event our company went tits up on short notice (we actually saw them exercise that with a prior vendor). They no longer do that as we're much bigger now.
- harshitaneja 2y ago
- modzu 2y agoyeah im not putting my dingdong in that cornucopia
- wruza 2y agoThis is a valid concern, as a stranger you can't know if this design doesn't have a surprise. And then there's this potential contact point at the bottom of V.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoSame thought, and great example of design that only works in a lab. And once the puddle underneath has formed, everyone else will stand even further back...
- giantg2 2y agoI hate to break it to you, but most of the urine on rhe floor isn't from splashback. Splashback is mostly solved with existing designs and splash screen/baffle inserts.
- pcurve 2y agoI agree. The urine on floor is because people are generally less careful in public toilet when aiming, peeing, fully draining, and flicking. When we're outside, we are generally more in rush. We had to 'hold in' longer before peeing because of line. It's unfamiliar setting with weirdly shaped urinal. And in some parts of Europe, urinals are installed so god damn high, I almost have to tip toe and pee into the the air in projectile.
- chasil 2y agoSo, from the article, instruction placards reduce cleaning costs by 8%. Obligatory nod to the infamous sign: "Gents Please Stand A Little Closer, It May Be Shorter Than You Think. "Ladies Please Remain Seated for The Entire Performance."
- tass 2y agoMen can sit too
- jillyboel 2y agoOn a urinal? Gross, and you may be misunderstanding what they're meant for.
- HideousKojima 2y agoAnd increase bathroom construction costs by 25-100% while reducing capacity by 50%! We don't have big shared troughs in sports stadium restrooms because of preference, it's purely cost and capacity. Urinals serve a similar purpose.
- janalsncm 2y agoI’ve seen one that said “one step forward for man, a giant leap for mankind”. Pretty amusing.
- physicles 2y agoHere in China, I’ve seen this sign dozens of times: “向前一小步，文明一大步” One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization.
- Cerium 2y agoI was going to mention - those signs are popular in Xiamen.
- 93po 2y agoif your hose is short or your flow is weak, please stand close to not wet your feet - some toilet in rural texas
- potato3732842 2y agoWhy can't we go back to the (what I now know after Googling) is the Kohler Derry or something along those lines? We had them in middle and high school and while I understand they might not be ideal for the inebriated or exceptionally careless you could piss anywhere in them as hard as you wanted without splash back. Decades later I encountered one in a maintenance facility nestled in the corner of maintenance shop, obviously not a code compliant install, spare me the hand wringing) and casually mentioned that I didn't know they still made them like that and was told that this is the 3rd facility it has been installed in, the guys like it enough to uninstall it and reinstall it each time.
- jtbayly 2y agoI love the environmental savings BS. Cleaning a floor with urine on it uses a certain amount of water, no matter what. You can get away with cleaning it less often, but you can’t get away with using 90% less water!
- Spooky23 2y agoI’m with you. Being able to maintain sanitary facilities with less effort is justification enough. The amount of water used to mop a floor doesn’t vary by how much urine spills. At least they didn’t try to make a carbon impact pitch.
- xboxnolifes 2y agoIf you clean the floors 10 times less often you can.
- whiddershins 2y agoargh, just have the back wall recede away from you as it gets lower. tilt it the other way. you could even use a curve.
- pilingual 2y agoI thought this was a solved problem? https://blog.siggraph.org/2021/02/a-look-back-at-past-emerging-technologies-submission-youre-in-control.html/ https://blog.siggraph.org/2021/02/a-look-back-at-past-emergi...
- irrational 2y ago> Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S. Each day?! 165 million males in the USA. So, 16.5 males on average are peeing enough on the walls and floors that if it was collected it would be an entire liter? That seems unlikely. What percentage of that 16.5 is not using public restrooms? What percentage is babies in diapers? Even if the number was as high as half, 8 men leaving behind a collective 1 liter seems way too high.
- dgacmu 2y agoI think you mean 165, not 16.5? But probably, what, only 50m use public restrooms, but some use multiple times, so 150 uses / liter seems reasonable. That's under 10ml of spray / spill per use, which is maybe a little high but not too crazy? I've seen some pretty bad spill results at work...
- whythre 2y agoIf you consider bar restrooms, that is probably skewing the average higher…
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoI think you drastically underestimate how much 10 ml are. That's not achievable with backsplatter, that's called "missing".
- thfuran 2y agoIt's almost but not quite exactly two teaspoons, which is certainly a plausibly achievable amount, but as you say, likely not by splatter.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThere is a "Daily Urine Splash Estimation in the US" section in their paper (I can't believe I looked this up). There equation basically makes these assumptions: 1. 56 million non-residential urinals in the US. 2. average of .22 L per "void" (a void is one pee session) 3. I think how they estimated average usage per urinal was weird and frankly wrong - they estimated each person would have between 3 and 6 "voids" per day, and each urinal would be used by between 1 and 2 people per day. Anyway, in any case that leads to an estimate of each urinal being used between 3 and 12 times per day. I think this estimate is way, way too high, because at the low end 3 X 56 million = 168 million, so on the low end they are estimating that, on average, every male in the US makes at least one public urinal pee (and, on the high end, 4 public urinal pees!) 4. Based on their data they calculate a value of ~1% (0.965%) of pee gets splashed onto the floor. So you multiply that all together: 56 million * .22 * (3 on the low end, 12 on the high end) * .965% = about 350,000L on the low end, or 1,400,000L on the high end, so they said "on the order of a million liters". Again, I can't believe I spent time looking this up and writing this comment.
- rr808 2y agoEven those dont solve the drip problem. The only solution is the ones with the grate you stand on.
- Isamu 2y agoWhy doesn’t Dyson create a vacuum urinal? We could use that for space stations anyway.
- leoh 2y agoIf only folks at Google’s Bayview Campus could learn to not piss all over the single occupancy bathroom’s toilet seats..
- 0_____0 2y agoBit of a tangent but occasionally I wonder how close we are to people disappearing into cyberspace for 10 hours at a time and thus using a Texas catheter à la Neuromancer. It seems like there are a notable minority of tech people who regard meat and meat space as an annoyance to be dealt with. How many of you would be happy at this moment to upload yourself to the cloud if it meant low latency, unmitigated access to computers, the internet, LLMs etc?
- kadushka 2y agoupload yourself You mean “upload a copy of yourself”, right? I guess I would be happy for my uploaded copy to live forever while I continue to age.
- thfuran 2y agoPerhaps that depends on your position on the you of Theseus.
- 0_____0 2y agoFrom the perspective of each consciousness, the other is the copy...
- 542354234235 2y agoIt depends on how you were uploaded. If they scanned your brain and recreated it, that would be a copy. But what if they scanned your brain once a week and each week, replaced a billion neurons with cloud-based ones? There would never be a time where there were two “yous” and whatever personality changes that came from having faster and more accurate digital neurons would be spread out over several years, much like children growing into adults.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago> We propose novel urinal designs that were generated by solving differential equations derived from the isogonal curve problem to ensure the urine stream impacts at or below this critical angle. Experiments validate that these designs can substantially reduce splashback to only 1.4% of the splash of a common contemporary commercial urinal. The widespread adoption of the urinal designs described in this work would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility. https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/8098745?login=false https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/80987... The experiments aren't in real world scenarios or with real urethrae excreting urine. > A pseudo-urethra nozzle matching the internal geometry of a human urethra was used to “urinate” a controlled jet of dyed water onto urinals and the subsequent splash was caught on a large paper on the floor.
- samaltmanfried 2y agoAnyone else here appreciate that this article appeared in a journal called 'PNAS Nexus'?
- schrectacular 2y agoIt's nut lost on me.
- schrectacular 2y agoI'm glad you put your head out there and had the balls to say it.
- boxed 2y ago> The experiments aren't in real world scenarios or with real urethrae excreting urine. Physics is physics though. Urine is not a magical substance that can violate conservation of momentum or the law of gravity.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoAnts have recently invaded the men's room at my office where the first floor is dug in a meter below ground level. They are loving the section in front of the urinals where the diabetics have left an ample food supply.
- dustbunny 2y agoI've actually made a joke for years that we're gonna put boots on mars before we figure out how to not piss on our pants. I've been trying to ask Elon on Twitter to design a urinal for years as a joke. This is amazing.
- ordersofmag 2y agoDo they really use 90% less water cleaning the floors of women's restrooms than men's currently? Cause that's one implication of the 'new design will save cleaning' claim. Places with public restrooms that I'm familiar with seem to get their floors mopped with identical frequency (and similar apparent rigor) regardless of whether they have urinals or not.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoI think the "Cornucopia" model is a great example of "blind" design that works a lot better in theory/fluid dynamics simulations than it would in actual usage. I would expect a significant percentage of users to find the "hole" design... uninviting, and as a result stand way farther back than the simulation assumed. (Exhibit 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669248) The best way to validate such findings would likely be 3D-printing single use versions of different urinals, mounting them at the student pub for one Friday evening, and monitoring usage amounts + the amount of urine on the floor mats (compared with a regular urinal next to it to account for different inebriation levels). This also avoids identifying models that men prefer/avoid if given the choice. (Also a great way to advertise that "90% of patrons preferred the new urinals" because you'll get that effect from the novelty value alone).
- voidfunc 2y agoYea the cornucopia model makes me uncomfortable... sharp and o pointy angles and blind corners are not things I want near my dick.
- notjoemama 2y agoI hope when they do their testing they cover a diverse age range. Um, it’s not the same when you get older. ;p
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoAlso real world installation. I am an average height dude, but have encountered several urinals which are barely useable. No idea how shorter men or children are supposed to operate them.
- PessimalDecimal 2y agoHow would one clean the inside of the "Cornucopia" design?
- steele 2y agoSitting would be preferable if the savages lifted seats to urinate and more toilet bowls shapes were steeper. A surprise dip in the devil's fondue is enough to make fella want to remove it and leave it there.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- 112233 2y agoI wonder how many pounds of feces and gallons of urine are breathed in because of the Dyson airblade and similar dryers. (and when I thought that was a peak bottom design, they made blowers integrated in the faucet, to blow around all the yuck from the sink.)
- Gud 2y agoA couple of times I’ve used some ancient urinals that look more like a wall with a drain at the bottom. Seems like a much better design? The second picture: https://www.stainlessrestorations.co.nz/before-after-cleaning-stainless-urinal.php https://www.stainlessrestorations.co.nz/before-after-cleanin...
- pSYoniK 2y agoNot sure how these are that "new" seeing as Toto (and I'm almost assuming other Japanese brands too) have had designs like the Nautilus for some years. One of the things that stuck with me a lot after a trip to Japan was exactly how thoughtful their toilet designs are. Public toilets with these tall urinals were amazingly clean in even the busiest stations and would allow you to get a good angle and not have splash on to the floor/shoes. Similar designs but scaled down were found in their newer Limited Express trains. Also, that angular design makes no sense, a human being will need to clean it and for anyone whos ever had to clean angular ceramics, they will know that that design will just be a pain to get proper clean... I guess what I'm saying is, before we start researching new methods, why can't we be bothered to spend even a little bit of time to see what else is out there.
- sebazzz 2y agoWe have the Fountaine at work, and it works just fine, as long as you don’t aim towards the fly but instead aim towards the drain hole of the water at the bottom. Funny btw, if you hold the flush button too long, the entire thing overflows.
- petee 2y agoThis seems to be an engineered-only solution without real world testing. A person teetering wildly 3 feet above are still going to miss that narrow design. Or you have to hover and let your pants touch the rim, which also probably puts you closer to the inevitable splash back. The only clear solution is to direct all splash back to the user so they can take it with them.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoThe cone over the drain, and/or the spiked mats (both inside the urinal) seem to have stopped all splashing and be widely used in UK without need to change the urinal itself. What one does find now is dyson-style hands dryers leave a massive area of spray. They seem to spray the water from your hands - and the water retained on the device - up into the air and across a wide area. At our work place there are bench style sinks that spray water everywhere too. And the sit-down toilets are terrible. I'm not an especially large man but it's almost impossible to use them without unnecessary contact. Sit-down toilets seem to be 'designed' by people who have no idea about their use by men.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoA fun variation on sit-down toilets is when they're automatic and tuned such that they flush if you lean forward.
- shmeeed 2y agoAKA Poseidon's Kiss. Thank god I never had the misfortune of having to use one of those...
- shmeeed 2y ago>unnecessary contact Took me a moment to realize you were referring to The Witch's Kiss. And yes, I fully agree on all points.