Also, people get milk jugs, fill them with rocks and put them in their toilet’s tanks to reduce the amount of water that gets flushed each time. Also a good idea if you don’t own a college. 
What, am I the only one who flushes public toilets with my foot? That solves the problem of the grossness of touching a public toilet handle without leaving any grossness for others to deal with. Win-win.
I like it when I discover a public bathroom that has an automatically flushing toilet, automatic sink/soap dispenser, automatic paper towels, and a doorless entrance/exit. If it were practical to install an automatic pressure sprayer in every stall that could spray down the toilet in between uses, we’d truly have the bathroom of the 21st century.
Until the next person who flushes uses their hand, and it’s like they’ve touched the bottom of your shoe (which has just walked across the* bathroom floor*). Look, take an extra piece of toilet paper, hold it between your hand and your handle while you flush, and toss it into the bowl as the water swirls away. You don’t touch the handle, and the next person doesn’t touch whatever gunge was on the bottom of your shoes. Win-win!
plus you don’t have as much control with your feet. You can damage the flushing mechanism by doing it that way. I’ve actually seen some restrooms with signs asking people not to use thei feet to flush.
I disagree. Toilets can go a couple of uses between flushes based on the “if it’s yellow, let it mellow…” rule, since the water in the bowl dilutes the urine and the toilet usually has a lid anyway. But most urinals don’t have any water in the bowl, and they don’t have lids ever, so it just becomes an open bucket of pure, foul-smelling piss if you don’t flush after each use. Anyway, a urinal uses less water per flush than a toilet. Just flush. Thanks.
Make that, “hold it between your hand and the handle while you flush.” I don’t want to know what you do with your handle.
Wow- 2nd of the month and already a new thread about flushing/not flushing the toilets and urinals. And as an added bonus, the whole ‘foot flushing’ debate revisited!
Wait- what’s this about washing your hands? You so crazy.
Sounds very decorative. Did you get that from Martha Stewart?
But wouldn’t that make a low flow toilet even more low flow? Practically no flow?
Urine left to fester smells rank, and it leaves a stain in the bowl. Flush it.
At home I let it mellow. I kind of think my partner doesn’t mind, since we both do it and both clean the toilet whenever we notice it needs it. However I object in no uncertain terms to arriving in the unisex toilet at work and finding several people’s thick orange stinking piss among wads of toilet paper which then won’t flush because there’s so damn much of it. Additionally, I did not invest in a fluid-bonded relationship with all these people when I signed my contract. I have to sit to pee. I don’t want your pee splashing up at my nethers, thanks. It’s gross.
ETA that needless to say, anyone who shits and doesn’t flush should be made to eat it.
Martha would paint the rocks with a mixture of buttermilk and moss (whirled in the blender) first, to help them acquire that “aged” look quickly.
This trick only works, and only makes sense, in older high-flow toilets. It can backfire, however, because some older toilets need that much water per flush to clear solid waste from from the bowl. Go ahead, ask me how I know this.
Of course, if you want to be really practical (or really devious), you skip the milk jug and rocks and just hide your (tightly capped) bottle of gin, beer, or other pricey/forbidden alcoholic beverage that’s best served cold. The incoming water is the right temperature to keep the booze cold, the bottle displaces plenty of water, and your parents/roommate won’t find it. Remember, water coming into the toilet tank from the house water supply is clean!
If you’ve ever removed a urinal from the wall after some years of use, you’ll understand why you should flush it.
Urine has all kinds of stuff in it, and the worst of it tends to calcify and crystallize in the outlet of the urinal. As time goes by, more & more of it crystallizes, clogging the outlet and makint the urinal not flush. Eventually someone has to take it off the wall and get all that stuff off. It’s pretty rough stuff to get out of there!!
I’ve had to cut holes in walls to add cleanouts in the line to allow for a snake to go down the line from a urinal, and it’s NASTY.
When I saw the new waterless urinals, I cringed knowing that those would cause more maintenance down the line to clean those pipes out. Ew!
First time I heard of it was on http://lifehacker.com/
Here’s a page about it.
And here is an image of it.
It might suck for flushing down poop but pee isn’t too hard.
My toilet at my apartment in Kansas City has a Sloan dual-power-flush mechanism. Up for pee, down for poop - but the up actually can remove shit most of the time. This thing uses water pressure to build up air pressure in a holding tank. Then the water is shot down the waterway. I compare it to flushing the toilet with a fire extinguisher - BOOM!
If I may…
A hearty…
EAT FLAMING DEATH!
…to those men who walk past a row of open urinals to go piss standing up in a stall. You fucking pussies! Nobody is going to stare at your widdle pee-pee! Use a urinal like a fucking man!
Why does this matter? Because I’ve noticed a 1:1 correlation between those who pee standing up in toilet stalls and those who pee on the fucking seat! And peeing on the seat is completely inexcusable. You don’t even have the lame rationalization of those heartless cunts who piss all over the seat in the ladies room. No, you just do it because you’re a scumbag who shouldn’t be allowed in the company of decent human beings.
That’s just dumb. Toilets are designed to work with a particular amount of water. If you want a lower water consumption toilet, buy one. But screwing up the function of a regular flow toilet by starving it of water is just asking for trouble. Changing a toilet is not that hard - I’d rank it as medium skill level for a home-owner as long as the floor it’s mounted on is not screwed up. The hardest bit is removing the old wax seal and fitting the new toilet on the old Johnny bolts.
What harm could that possibly do to your toilet or plumbing though?
You sound like the kind of guy that would come and pee right next to me even when there’s 5 other urinals on the other side. What the hell is wrong with using a toilet?
So, you’re one of those guys who piss on the seats?
As I said, nobody is gonna look at your widdle pee-pee. I’m like all the other grown-up men, and follow the rules of urinal spacing - if there are five urinals and the right-most one is occupied, I’ll use the left-most one. The only time I’ll use the urinal next to you is when all the other urinals are in use. The only time I’ll use a stall is if I have to take a shit. And there better not be any fucking piss on the seat!
I just don’t put my nose in the urinal,which solves the smell problem.
But saving water is hwaaaaaaay more important than dudes sensibilities.
Good low-flow toilets move their smaller volume of water through more quickly. But full-flow toilet (the old five gallon models) or a cheap low-flow use gravity to move water and waste. Reducing the amount of water in the tank without increasing the velocity of the water means the toilet is much less efficient - the shit and piss don’t get moved away, turds and paper don’t get broken up and the toilet and drain lines are much more likely to clog. Couple that with the fact that people who have old 5 gallon toilets probably also have old, nearly clogged cast iron drain lines. Making their toilets less efficient at their job by trying a stupid, cheesy trick like the old brick in the tank is just making things worse.