No, no, no, I’m not trying to avoid doing that myself. I like to flush. I like it even more when other men flush so I don’t have to look at and possibly smell the pool of stagnant pee they leave behind.
At work, we’ve got urinals that automatically flush, so we don’t have to rely on the social graces of others.
However, occasionally I’ll come into the bathroom and find – a bright yellow pool of pee in one of the urinals. Some guy managed to pee and retreat without triggering the autoflush.
How? While I haven’t experimented extensively, the urinals always flush when I walk away from them.
Does the phantom pee-er whiz from a distance? Back up so slowly he doesn’t trigger the sensor? Not have any body heat (at least one co-worker theorized that the urinals sense body heat, which I think is bogus, but it’s a theory)?
Or is it just a randomly occurring glitch that hasn’t occurred to me?
There is one in my office that sometimes doesn’t flush. I don’t know why. Usually when I walk away it flushes but sometimes, usually late in the afternoon, I can do my business and walk away and nothing happens. I’ve even tried going back and standing there for a few seconds, then walking away again, but still nothing. Next time I come back it works fine.
You may have something similar in your situation, but I don’t know what the cause is. Some of them have a manual activation button on the side of the unit if you look for it, but mine doesn’t.
At one workplace a few years ago, if I wore a black shirt the auto-flusher would not activate. Apparently the sensor was infrared and my black shirt absorbed the beam and was not able to detect my presence. I even tried moving my hand in front of the sensor to get the autoflusher to activate. Rather than looking like a complete tool waving my hand at a urinal I gave up and decided I’d better get back to work and just hope the next guy could get it to flush.
That’s an interesting observation. Now that you mention it, most of the times it doesn’t flush for me is when I’m on my way out of the building and wearing my black leather jacket. This calls for some experimentation.
The most common old-school auto cistern consists of an automatic siphon that flushes when water reaches a certain level, and a petcock which fills the cistern. By adjustng the petcock, you can time the flushes; a tight petcock lets water in slower, so the cistern takes longer to fill, and therefore flush. No sensors, no gadgets. You can have the urinal flushing every two minutes or every hour. So, it could be if you have this system in your building, that theres a big puddle of piss that just hasnt flushed yet. And, it could be that you just happen to finish your whizz as it flushes again. Coincidence, maybe.
This is all based on the old model cisterns, if by an automatic flush you mean that it flushes as you leave, in the same manner an automatic door opens as you approach, then I cant help you… I do know that such sensors dont work if you walk real slowly up to them, but I dont know why anyone would be slowly backing away from a urinal.
This is the kind of urinal I’m talking about. There’s a blinky sensor up near where the handle would be on a manual urinal, and you can see it flash when you take your leave. I’ve never been in the bathroom when someone backed away from it without causing it to flush, but apparently it happens.
Nature’s Call, I’m not pissed off (ha!) so much as baffled. I’d like to know the secret methods being used.
The black shirt scenario sounds promising. More experimentation may be needed.
It’s better to be pissed off then pissed on. Anyways, is it possible there’s a timer on it as well. For example at work we have both an automatic air freshner and an automatic paper towel dispenser. Both of them have some sort of a trigger (air freshner needs lights in bathroom to be on, paper towel dispenser needs someone to wave their hand in front of it), but along with the trigger a certain amount of time must have elapsed since the last time it went off.
Maybe, possibly the urinal is flushing because it had flushed to recently. Maybe after it flushes it waits for, say, five minutes before it will flush again. This would most likely be to prevent it from flushing over and over again if ther person leans back or moves a little.
In our bathroom, we have three urinals that have the motion-detector autoflush on them.
If I stand slighty to the side of the urinal, it will not flush when I move away.
Contrarily, many times if I am standing directly in front of the urinal, it will flush * while I am still using it *. Nothing makes me feel less significant than being dissed by the autoflusher.
With some types of autoflush, if it doesn’t notice you leaving, you can use your watch face to reflect it and get it to flush. I’ve noticed this especially with relatively poorly-maintained restrooms, such as those at turnpike rest stops.
I’m now firmly in the black shirt camp. Today when I left the office I stopped by the restroom wearing my black leather jacket. No flush. I unzipped the jacket so my blue shirt was visible and stepped up again, waited a few seconds and stepped back. It flushed. Repeat with black jacket–no flush. Repeat with blue shirt–flush.
Next time you see the horrid yellow pool, look around the office for someone wearing a black shirt. He’s your culprit.
No. Urine is made by filtering out stuff from your bloodstream in the kidney. When a vampire drinks blood, presumably it just goes straight into his bloodstream and just operates as new blood. So to the vampire’s kidney, not a lot has changed, so the output will be pretty much the same.
Interesting. My workplace has automatic urinals. I’ve never had a black shirt not trigger them, mainly because I’ve never worn a black shirt to work, but there’s a particular shirt I occasionally wear that doesn’t trigger the auto-flush. It’s a dull brick-red color with greyish stripes every 2 inches or so, with a sort of flannelly-fleecy-ish fabric.
If the sensors are using infrared, I would think that a red shirt would reflect back the light quite well, but apparently not. I have another shirt in an identical style, except it’s dark grey with light grey stripes, and it triggers the auto-flush just fine, so it’s not the fabric that’s causing the effect.
I’m a female, so I don’t know the answer to this, but aren’t there manual levers on the urinals in the event it doesn’t flush on its own? It sounds like there isn’t, which seems… odd. All the automatic toilets I’ve used had at least a button that could be pushed if the autoflush didn’t work.
Most of the autoflushers I have seen do not have an obvious manual flush button. There may be one hidden on there somewhere, but the designs give the impression that they do not.
You know what really sucks, though? An overzealous autoflush commode. I go into the bathroom, take a seat cover, place it on the seat, turn around, and FLUUUUUUSH, damn, there goes my seat cover, and I got a spraying of fesh toilet water on my bum. I also have to try to get another seat cover, and have my knees touching the toilet as I contort myself around so the sensor doesn’t decide my bum needs more bathing.
I once played this silly little game with the toilet 3 times, and when you gotta go, let me tell you that’s no fun.
I came into this thread hoping someone else would mention the IR sensor(s) in these things. The one in the Men’s room at work seemed to be triggered that way and usually worked as intended. But there was one shirt, a red and black plaid flannel, that would cause it no end of confusion. No matter how I tried to get out of “view” of the sensor, the thing would flush a minimum of three times when I had that shirt on. All I could figure was that the pattern and/or density of that fabric gave the IR sensor some mixed signals.