When regulatory/certification organizations like CSA, TUV, BSA, etc. evaluate flush toilets, do they use a “standardized” turd to test these appliances? I wonder if there is sch a thing as a CE description of such an object (defining the mass, size, consistency, etc.). After all, it must be possible to objectively test toilest; to do so must mean that you have to test them under the same conditions-hence the “standard turd”.
Just like the chickens they fire at airliner cockpit windows!
A good question ralph124c. I do not have the answer - however, for accurate calibration surely one would test a flush toilet to failure? So not so much a standard turd, as a standard pipe-choker. The upper limit, beyond which flushing becomes a futile gesture.
I am not clicking that link. Nope. Not gonna do it.
So is it not the median or mode but a mean turd you’re looking for?
Which leads me to wonder how many standard deviations above the mean would the turd that Busy Scissors mentioned be?
I don’t know but who better to check with about configuring it to size than Busy Scissors?
It is completely safe to click.
Oh my god.
Can’t process the fact that **Floater **posted in a thread about turds, can you?
It was good coffee, too.
Oh, and too late to edit:
How about that book about engineering for humans in space, Packing for Mars(amazon link)? Gotta be something about this in there…I’ve been meaning to, but has anyone read it?
For medical purposes there is the Bristol stool scale, “with 3 and 4 being the ideal stools especially the latter.” The Wikipedia article includes a convenient picture chart.
This just calls to mind this headline from The Onion 
I saw a documentary about a toilet manufacturing facility once. They use a number of objects to test the flushing success of a toilet, from golf balls, to soaked wads of paper, to a biodegradable dough-like concoction that is meant to simulate, well, a turd. It’s not just one thing, but a whole range of them.
Watched a show about how toilets are made, maybe on History Channel, and the manufacturer used bean paste sealed in condoms for testing.
I was once taken aside by an English friend who asked if I knew what my name means in his cultural circles (I do). :eek: He also told me that he had seen a cross section of a toilet where you could follow a turd through the mechanism. When it came out a robot arm lifted it up and placed in the bowl again.
Yes. It’s made of platinum-iridium alloy and kept in a temperature-controlled vault in Paris.
I munderstand that toilet manufacturers use a variety of things to test their devices, including ping-pong balls.
City of Shite.
We don’t 'cotton to no Metric stuff 'round here… we’ll stick with the American Long Ton, thank you very much.
Boeing uses dog kibble to test the toilet system on jetliners.