About all I care about is that it is 2 ply. With single ply toilet paper, you run the risk of your finger going through the paper and giving yourself a prostate exam.
ARGH! Those dispensers should be cited in the “poor product design” thread.
The ones I’ve experienced in the US nominally hold the upper roll above (and out of the way of) the lower roll until the lower roll is empty. Then supposedly you can have the upper roll fall down into place. What happens in reality is the upper roll falls down onto the lower one, and you have to somehow hold the upper roll up with one hand so you can unroll paper from the lower one using the other hand; half the time, you wind up getting paper from both rolls at once.
Years back, I stayed at a hotel in NYC where, in an effort to appear Fancy, the toilet paper roll was embossed with the hotel’s logo.
This was apparently done by pressing a damp die of some sort into the roll as it hung on the dispenser.
Which meant that the outermost 6 or 7 layers of the toilet paper roll were DAMP. Ewwwww. Huge waste - I wasn’t gonna use that damp TP, so it went straight into the trash.
Makes the “folding the end into a pointy shape” trick seem a lot less silly, in retrospect.
It is, indeed. I was worried about that being a bit too brutal, in winter months, but I realized that the water comes from pipes that run through the house’s interior walls, so the water really isn’t any colder than room temperature. The heated bidet (which is only in the master bathroom) is certainly NICER, but the others are perfectly fine, and quite an improvement over just using TP for scrubbing.
I have seen bidets that can attach to the hot water pipe as well as the cold water feed; I don’t know that those would be any more practical, and it seems like they’d require a plumber to install since you’d be tapping into a pipe, rather than just a splitter off the toilet’s feed. But for some bathrooms, that might be an option versus running electrical power to near the toilet (it wouldn’t be an option in any of ours).
The Romans , in their public latrines, had a sponge on a stick in a bucket of water. While this would work an awful lot better than dry toilet paper (or pages from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, or corn cobs, or even the necks of geese), it squicks me out on several levels
1.) using a device that’s been used by LOTS of other people
2.) and that’s been sitting in a container of water, a great breeding ground for bacteria
3.) and that probably hasn’t been cleaned since its previous use
The thought of using a sponge-on-a-stick that’s reserved for my own private use isn’t all that more acceptable, if it lived in a bucket of water and didn’t get cleaned. Something disposable, like those “wet wipes”, would be great. But, of course, you’re not supposed to thrown them in the toilet, claims to being “flushable” notwithstanding. And you certainly couldn’t flush a sponge on a stick.
Although I’d have no problem using disposable wet wipes in a Roman latrine, or modern outhouse. I wonder if some Romans didn’t use their own disposable wipes made of water-saturated bits of discarded cloth. It swould’ve been preferable to using a wet sponge held in common and re-used.
On the “bidet water temp” issue…
The Tushy Spa is $129, and hooks up (very easily) to your toilet fill line for cold water, and runs a flexible hose hookup to the hot water tap feed on the bathroom sink. It has an adjustable temperature knob; you turn on the self-clean (just open the tap on the bidet a trickle) to allow the water to warm up a bit if it is a concern to you (I don’t bother nowadays).
I had a problem with… ah… “itchy bum” for over a year. Finally went away when I switched to the bidet rather than TP.
Pretty sure “germ theory” wasn’t a known concept back (Ha!) then.
The nitpicky nerd in me is genuinely curious: what material did they use for the sponge?
Years ago, I ran across a post (maybe Reddit?) where a plumber said those things put his kids through college.
The Swiss have apparently upgraded to 4-ply, per cites in this thread.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like an absolute peasant right now.
Matter of fact, imma add that to my bucket list: “Experience the wonder of 4-ply T.P. with SHEA BUTTER WTF once before I die.”
The necks of geese.
Bacteria? Try intestinal worms: Despite Latrines and Aqueducts, Ancient Romans Were Full of Worms | Discover Magazine
The label on a 1.25 liter bottle of Crystal Geyser sparkling water says, “25% more than 1L bottle.”
Natural sea sponges, usually from the genera Spongia and Hippospongia, often Spongia officinalis.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I was recalling, a day or two ago.
It does depend on the sink’s hot-water feed being sufficiently close to make it practical. Our powder room is shaped so that this would require a longish (4-5 feet) hose going around a corner. Our other two bathrooms have vanities versus an open sink, so it would require drilling a hole in the vanity (but otherwise, it’s workable). We have an electrically-heated one in the master bathroom, and my son can just deal with the cold water.
We had installed one in the parents’ condo in Florida. For some reason, the times we used it, we never had any trouble with the water being too cold!
Sorry to brag, but we are now up to 5-ply 
I would like to know whats wrong with baby wipes. Seems better than a bidet.
Problems with flushability come to mind.
They generate a lot of trash. Plus, they ain’t free. A bidet obviously has a bigger up-front cost to offset.
More importantly, I don’t believe that baby wipes and those aimed at adult users are really flushable; they cause all sorts of problems for municipal solid waste agencies. (Cite from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.)
They are absolutely NOT flushable, and say so - in very fine print - on the back label.
I dont flush them.
That’s good but very many people do flush them, causing lots of problems.
Also 6-ply. This is product available in the Migros closest to me
Aren’t they eventually going to get up to so thick a wad that it won’t fit in the necessary location?
Springfield Oval – haven’t thought of it in years. Never seen it anywhere but MIT. I’m class of '71.