Also, if she is older and has mobility issues than the ADA (or just common niceness) comes into play. It would be hard (or maybe even illegal) for a landlord to deny this woman a modification that would enable her to properly take care of herself under her circumstances.
If she is fairly large then using wipes could be just as much of a difficulty as regular toilet paper. A bidet seat would take care of that “reaching around” problem and be much easier and more hygienic for her.
As to the OP’s actual question, the punch line is the patient *will *clog the toilet with wipes eventually. If she’s competent to recognize that a clogged toilet is a stinky messy disaster and that her [del]landlord[/del]slumlord will leave it to fester for weeks, that may be enough to incentivize her to use a covered wastebasket for the wipes.
If she’s not competent the answer is for you to quit buying her wipes.
I’m not mobility-challenged but both these threads opened my eyes to something I’ve never heard of before: people using these wipes as TP or an after-TP. What’s wrong with how we’ve all done it for a hundredish years now? I’m all for modern improvements that are actual improvements. But TP ain’t broke, at least not for most of us. Color me confused.
Right. I’m sure a nail in the wall is responsible for many more water leaks than a poorly-sealed tee inserted into the supply line of a toilet. :dubious:
And you’re overlooking OP’s relationship to the little ol’ lady: none whatsoever, other than a vague government-funded “helper” role. If the worst happens, who pays for it? Obviously the government agency that hired OP. Because the plumbing work was being done by a representative of that government agency.
BTW, I understand what installing a bidet seat requires. I have one. I’m confident I could have done it DIY, but since it was during the course of a full bathroom renovation, having a plumber do it professionally cost me nothing (within the rounding of the hourly rate) and saved me crawling around on the floor for 15 minutes. Win-win. And also, I own the house, so I don’t need any more permission than that. Not so much for a third-party representative of an agency interfering with the integrity of a landlord’s property.
No on is pooping on your parade. You’re underestimating the impacts involved, probably because you’re (rightly) enthusiastic about the practical upsides.
Even if it’s the perfect solution, you can’t do it without addressing the legalities of it. In this case, tenant/landlord law with respect to modifications to the plumbing.
Our house has a septic tank, and we use a mix of TP and wipes, but no problems in the 19 years we’ve lived here. We get the septic tank pumped out every 3 years usually, but this last time we let it go for 4 and a half years before getting it pumped earlier this year, and still no issues. Have we just been lucky all this time?
FWIW, I had no idea that flushable wipes were a problem until this recent thread, but I see why they shouldn’t be flushed into public plumbing systems. Just not convinced about septic systems, given our lack of problems over a considerable stretch of time.
Basically, what happened was that when the baby-wipe market was saturated, makers of wipes started making commercials encouraging adults to use wet wipes, which would get them cleaner than dry TP. It was like when the market for people who actually needed a product like Boost or Ensure was saturated, so those advertisements started to pop up suggesting that perfectly healthy adults needed to drink them.
I think you’ve been really lucky, because 3 years is a pretty long time. Maybe you have a bigger tank than your house actually needs. Most people get them sucked out ever 12-18 months, IME. If you really let it go that long, you may be breeding some bacteria that breaks down the wipes, which most people’s tanks don’t have time to produce. That’s all I can guess.
Also, how old is your system? Septic systems tend to have harder water than city water, so the pipes are more limed up, and the wipes are more likely to clog the pipes and not even make it to the tank. If your house, or your pipes, are new, then you don’t have to worry about lime build-up snagging wipes (yet). We had a house from the 30s, and it had, I think, the original soil pipe. The tank had been replaced in the 60s or 70s. We couldn’t even flush regular TP. We had to flush the toilet with Lime-Away every 6 months.
We drank bottled water. We didn’t even give out pets that tap water.
Our system’s 25 years old. 3 years in between having the tank pumped out seems to be standard around here; that’s the interval the companies around here (at least, the two we’ve used) suggest that do the pumping out, and if they thought a shorter interval was advisable, they’d have every reason to let us know.
Our tap water is county water, and is just fine for drinking, same as practically everywhere else I’ve lived. (I’ve been places where the water is a little bit hard, so I can taste it when it’s there. Not to mention, it wouldn’t take us 19 years to notice the lime buildup on stuff.) The town we live in actually has its own sewer system, but the neighborhood we live in is mostly outside the town limits, so they never extended the sewer lines to the handful of houses (including ours) that are inside the line. So it’s a fluke, really, that we don’t have sewer service.
My mother used flusable wipes at her new-ish townhome and ended up paying $800 to the plumber. He told her to never flush them, no matter what the directions on the box say.
