Ok I see those late night commercials where they say “are you an inventor, call us and we’ll BUY your invention”
So I thought of all the bathrooms that have to be cleaned, with some poor schlub on her knees scrubbin away, and figured we could use a “self-cleaning” bathroom.
The whole room would be waterproof–and there would be sprinklers on top, like those fire sprinklers you see, and when you set the “self-cleaning” timer on and closed the door, the sprinkles would jet out cleanser and use water pressure, like a car wash. It would drain away and a heat lamp could help dry it.
No more paying janitors, which in some places cost a lot because of market/union wages.
They already exist, mainly as public bathrooms in some European cities I think. The show Trigger Happy TV did a bit where an actor pretended to get stuck in one during the wash cycle. He walked in, started screaming, and then walked out soaked and covered in toilet paper, which of course he did to himself using the sink.
I’ve seen waterproof public restrooms in the US cleaned with a garden hose.
And I’ve wanted to have washable bathrooms in my own house for as long as I can remember, though I pictured being able to scrub and rinse while throwing water around and letting it go down the drain, not having it be automatic.
Somehow, though, I bet the leakage would be a big problem, because construction that separates the wet from the dry always seems to be mostly sealed. Light bulbs are so well sealed that years later they have not let a thimblefull of air creep in, and for less than a buck. But in the entire history of mankind, every single skylight ever installed was installed wrong.
I saw an article on some self cleaning ones in the USA a few years ago. The room seals and goes through a wash cycle during the wee early hours of the morning or should that be wee wee hour of the morning.
They have a motion detector. If there is no discernible movement of a certain length of time, they assume it’s empty and will self-clean even with you in it. I imagine they’ve mostly ironed that bug out of the system, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it still happens occasionally.
Apartment complex bathrooms in Japan are all like this. Every bathroom is formed out of two shaped segments of plastic, a top and bottom, that are bolted together. The bottom half swoops up to include a countertop with sink and the walls of a bathtub. In the bottom middle there’s a big drain, and the bathtub has a shower on a hose so you can spray down the whole room. If you crawl up through the roof of the thing, you’ll find that it’s sitting on a couple of pedestals and there’s enough room to walk around nearly the full perimeter of the thing and the other walls of the apartment.
Not classy, but it was nice for cleaning. You’d just get in your shorts, grab some cleaning foam spray and a sponge, and go at it.
I went to one of these in San Fransico a couple of months ago. I don’t know if it was out of cleaning solution or what, but even though it was still wet inside after the “cleaning” cycle, the thing still smelled of stale piss. So I’m doubtful about how well they actually function.
Well, the public pissoirs in San Francisco catch tons of abuse by bums and drug users. IIRC, the way they’re supposed to work is the toilet retracts into the wall to be scrubbed and the rest of the room is sprayed down.
Naturally, people devise all sorts of ways to screw it up.
I knew someone who renovated their home, and one of the features was for the bathrooms to be all tile up to the ceiling, with floor drains. The light fixtures were sealed and/or recessed, and there was about a two-inch curb at the entrance, making it all kid-proof, flood-proof and easy to clean. While amazingly practical, it did look unfortunately a bit like a locker room.
French advertising comapny (JC deCoux) offered to build 500 of these (self-cleaning public toilets) for free in Boston-the payback was the advertising. The local human rights people nixed the deal-the blue lighting inside made it impossible for drug users to find a vein. Plus, the places were not 100% wheelchair accessible. So, the people of boston have to find other accomodations (can’t discriminate against the homeless)!
Yeah, I saw one in Italy at the Cascata delle Marmore. It seemed rather wasteful since it cleaned after every use, and honestly I didn’t leave it any dirtier than it started. And it was rather large, much bigger than a Portajohn.
A friend rented an apartment to a family from Japan. Apparently, they thought their bathroom was waterproof. They used no shower curtain, leading to an incredible amount of damage.
There is one at Sixth Avenue & 31st Street (Greeley Square) that I have seen, and another at 35th Street & Sixth, Herald Square, I have heard about but not seen, both run by the 34th Street Partnership.
25 or 50 cents, I forget which, buys 15 minutes in the restroom. There’s a digital countdown timer and a warning voice your time is soon up. The door automatically opens after the alotted time. The facility is in a leafy, landscaped setting in the large middle island of the busy square, looking somewhat like a subway entrance. It doesn’t seem to be heavily used. I have not used it but it has been desocupado each time I’ve walked by. As I understand it, the floor rotates out of sight after each use, as does the commode, to be cleaned by brushes and squeegies.
I did actually use one years ago, probably 1988, setting on the sidewalk at the northeast corner of City Hall Park near Brooklyn Bridge subway station. That was a temporary experimental one, as I remember, but the one at Greeley Square has been there for quite a while, at least a couple years.
I think these sort of bathrooms are called wetrooms. I find the idea appealing, although you need to make sure to keep the toilet paper dry (perhaps by putting the toilet as far as possible from the shower). And I prefer an enclosed shower when it’s cold out, just to retain the heat. But if the bathroom had a heated floor, that might make it more comfortable.
Yeah, these have been around for ages. I used a couple while traveling in France about a decade ago. I called them “dishwasher toilets” because that is what they sounded like when they closed up for cleaning after each use.