A few years ago I was at a concert at an old stadium and was surprised to find the urinals didn’t flush (they weren’t broken, they were just not set up to flush-no water connection). They just had a drain at the bottom. My question is, why don’t all urinals work this way? Think about it: what good does flushing do? Seems to me they wouldn’t necessarily smell worse if you had no flushing mechanism (the one I used seemed otherwise okay), and you’d save tons of water. So why bother?
Art
WAG: The urinals at the concert are only turned on (that is, water flowing through them for rinsing) immediately before the concert and turned off after the concert. For urinals that are used throughout the day - everyday, it doesn’t make sense to run water through them 24/7 when only a gallon or so flush now and then will do.
But the urinals that Art saw were not the continual-flush variety, they had no water at all.
I would imagine such a urinal would be rather painfully smelly. The purpose of the flush is not only to clean the remaining urine out, but to establish a liquid seal between the urinal and the sewer pipes in the U-shaped pipe underneath. That seal prevents sewer smells from coming up the drain. You want that to consist of mostly water; if all the liquid trapped in there is urine, well, 'twill be narsty.
But I suppose that at a stadium, with many tens of thousands of pissing males, flushing urinals would be rather problematic and a huge waste of time. I have seen urinals that were essentially a giant pissing trough along a wall. You had to make your way up to it and jockey for position, squeezed uncomfortably close to your fellow pissers.
The smell would be the major factor. Without some flush, it would get pretty rank after awhile.
I’m sure that the amount of people using it in a stadium will create enough of a flow during events, so a hosing down afterwards might be enough.
There are flushless urinals. The ones I’ve seen (at American University in Washington DC) have a tank with several inches of an oil that floats on water. The oil forms a seal that prevents odors from rising, and the urine drains whenever it reaches a certain level (there’s a sort of teapot spout from the bottom for drainage – the urine leaves by that when the level’s high, but the oil does not). It requires occasional cleaning (and new oil), but no water is required.