Love that movie! Caught by a sneeze or was it a cough?

Gesundheit.

Avantgarde flush mechanisms are great until they need fixing.

Just pop down the local DIY store and grab the cheapest all-inclusive kit they do, Mr Dabbs.

Otherwise it'll be many more "Pffft"s, shrugs and €€€s.

(BTW It will turn out to be the o-ring silicone seal that absorbs water and causes water-filled bubbles on the surface of the seal. Just prick them all with a pin. Takes a while but is very satisfying.)

One worse has to be Leroy Merlin. Their Cotê D’Azur branch is just off an almost unmarked road which, if you miss it, puts you right into the A8 péage. The store is up a long winding roads at the top of a hill which peters out to a track before you see the entrance. Store service makes you long for the occasional insult you get at Castodrama or even (what my nearest and dearest calls) BalsUpitrand.

That actually used to be a very nice Habitat.

I note Amazon has one described as:

No Touch 100% Hygienic Hands Free Infrared Close Coupled Toilet Cistern Complete Fitting Kit Bottom Supply

It's just the close coupling to the bottom supply that has me a little concerned.

But at least it's hands free - not even one click.

Why is there a need for handsfree flushes?

Is it for prople who don't wash their hands?

But do you wash hands before or after flushing? What if another user does the opposite?

The only way to be both sure, and considerate of others, is to wash both before *and* after pressing the button/ lever/ whatnot. :-/

That reminds me of a cruise ship we were on where there was a sign instructing you to use a paper towel to open the toilet door on exiting, but then didn't provide a bin for the used paper towels thus promoting the spread of whatever nasties (probably norovirus back then) that they were concerned about.

At the motorway services recently I noticed the loo had a touchless flush (to it's credit, it seemed to work as required), but then you hand to use your hand to unlock and open the cubical door!

I've seen those, but you still have to find a cubicle that is clean enough that you dare sit down (I sometimes take wet towels in to clean the seats because of the scumbags who insist on using cubicles for a Number 1, then do it all over the floor).

But that reminds me of a toilet in a restaurant in Switzerland I was in in the 1980s. It was either Verbier or Zermatt.

The seat had a motorised plastic sleeve. When you pressed the button, a new length of sleeve was pulled around so you always sat on a clean seat.

They used to have those at Nice Airport.

Also ones where the whole seat would rotate through a washer/squeegy contraption at the back meaning you always had to sit on a damp bogseat.

Toilet.

Flush.

Wash.

Leave.

Is it now needing rocket-science ???

Depends on the type of work you do. A rocket scientist will presumably wash his hands after using the toilet. A motor mechanic may well choose to wash before.

Back in the mists of time, when I studied chemistry, it was very much more important to wash your hands before, than after, the skin on your hands being somewhat thicker, and less permeable, than skin, *ahem*, elsewhere.

Of course, this is on top of wearing suitable gloves, using a fume hood, etc., and as a student, most of the chemicals commonly used were fairly innocuous, but it is important to teach good habits, to avoid ending up like [1]Karen Wetterhahn .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

Thanks for the linked wiki page - I was not aware of it or the dangerous mercury compounds.

The truly tragic thing is that Karen Wetterhahn was following the recommended safety procedures for dimethyl mercury at the time, it's just nobody realised at the time just how quickly it diffuses through latex, and skin.

And a chef who works with hot peppers will definitely wash before, and hopefully, after.

Microbiologist wash their hands before and after.

I did not know about Karen Wetterhahn, what a tragic story.

Eden:” At Eton we were taught to wash our hands after using the WC”

Churchill: “At Harrow we were taught not to pee on our hands”

I used to work at a place where there was a sign over the paper towel dispenser...

"Now wash your hands"

Supposedly true story: brother of my best friend was an aircraft mechanic in the Canadian Air Force. He was visited at work by a trio of American Top Gun types.

He pops into the washroom for a quick leak, and with hands and arms covered in some kind of aviation gunk, returned to work without cleaning his hands.

The hotshot Yankee pilot shouts "In the American military they teach us to wash our hands after using the toilet."

To which he responds "In the Canadian air force they teach us how to piss without getting it all over our hands '

This is just where technology and the use of it has gone completely bonkers. Exactly why does a toilet or tap need any form of electronics in it?

Handles and more recently push buttons have proved adequate for years only requiring the occasional washer of valve to fix.

I get the sensors in public toilets, particularly on the urinals but on taps etc, just stupid.

Even the fashion for the valves rather than siphons has created more issues with them leaking more frequently and the leak often unseen as the overflow is into the bowl. I know there was a lot of fuss about how the valves reduced water usage as they could "dual flush" but with the push to reduce the size of the flush it is now so inefficient, the small flush is useless and the big flush often fails on "solids".

Net result more water used instead of having one slightly larger flush.

Precisely. Why the need for extra 'smart' bits that will go wrong within a few months (just after the warranty expires)

Our facilities team took the opportunity to revamp our toilets during office lockdown closure.

Nice one, they were looking a bit worse for wear but they still functioned.

We now have fancy new toilets with electronic no touch flush senors, but and here's the kicker, after installing them they realised there wasn't any power by the new cisterns so they had to use batteries to power the flush. Normal triple A's!!!

Pathetic! Now every three or four weeks the toilets clog because the sodding batteries have died.

To make it worse everyone is now petrified that it won't flush after they've used the toilet so everyone is flushing once before they use it to check it's still working!! Batteries run out twice as fast.

Clearly a sh*t job, but I wouldn't poo poo it.

I'll be here all week, thanks.

:)

Having recently fitted several dirt cheap Wickes loos with dual (4 litre / 6 litre) flushes I can safely say that they seem to work perfectly well. Problems I've seen in the past (even with old-fashioned flushes) tend to be down to dodgy waste plumbing - if the loo isn't quite level (particularly front-to-back) it can cause problems, as can a too-tight bend immediately behind the pan or maybe a pipe which doesn't "fall" properly.

At least we have 4" waste pipes around here, rather than some other countries which seem to try to force everything down to 3" or even smaller.

Our own toilets are flushed using rainwater. We have a 7,500l tank under the garden which takes run-off from the roof, and a 24V pump which (now) runs from solar-charged batteries. Last winter it ran from a mains transformer - I'm interested to see how the system works over the winter this year. So far there has only been one day when the battery charge has risked getting too low to run the pump. I could put bigger batteries in, but they get quite expensive.

No, it'll never pay back - the price of potable water in our part of the UK is under 1p per 6l flush - but we have historically had a lot of problems with getting rid of rainwater around here, so flushing some of it down the loo helps considerably, and gets us a discount from our water bill - the "surface water rebate".

M.

So we are moving into a nice shiny new office.

We have decided that the designer / architect needs to be shot, or at least fall down some artisanal stairs somewhere.

getting back to the relevancy.. they have installed the touch free loos like you mention.

While you do mention the random flushings when no one is there, you fail to mention the random flushings while you are sitting contemplating why you suddenly have a wet arse.

The blue stripes that change colour to indicate that you have flushed from outside of the door.

We also have a dark décor reminding me of the metal bars I frequented in my youth, but without their charm.

I could go on about the rest of the place but better not :)

Reminds me of so many airport toilets I've visited in the past (back when flying was still a thing). Sitting there, as still as possible - which let's face it, isn't that easy when you're "doing the business". Eventually, you move half a millimetre and the sensor behind your back decides that you've finished. Immediately, you're subjected to an arse soaking as the flush triggers beneath you.

... but somehow is still difficult to (re)trigger once you've finished and stood up....

It all sounds so much like a throwaway footnote from HHGTTG.

Dorset County Council offices - has state of the art eco - toilets.

Until there was a power cut and the toilets won't flush and so all the staff went home........

That's to discourage you from spending too long on the khazi. "Every 23 minutes", as described in the article, is by design - that's the absolute limit for a toilet break as specified by EU directives.

Why not just cut the power to the thing?

Or replace it with a £55 toilet from Screwfix?

I managed to hold back the laugh long enough to swallow the mouthful of coffee... but it was close.

"Ah, good, my groin has lit up. I must have new mail."

I was almost in tears after reading last week's column and that one sentence brought it all back, visons of Dabbsy poking at his illuminated crotch on the metro!

This one got me too.

Unfortunately, my mid-morning tea did not fare quite as well so I am now typing at an odd angle while it drains out of my keyboard - you can nearly hit CTRL-Y in one keystroke from this angle ;)

(I would say you owe me a new keyboard but have a pint for the entertainment)

I do my best to not picture Dabbsy poking at his crotch, illuminated or not!

...featuring Leonard Cohen on the twanging ruler

Can't seem to find it on the tube of you. But I really want to.

That's what I was going to ask, is this really a thing and how do I not know about it?!

I googled it but, unfortunately(?), got no relevant results...

The fact that this doesn't seem to exist makes me sad.

Try Children of Bodom - Oops I Did It Again, instead.

I had a plumber to connect a gas hob. I had to give him wire wool and a heat conducting mat. He then wen to test the gas pressure and announced that we had a gas leak as there was no pressure. He called the gas emergency service who turned up and found no leak. They did find something blocking the hose on the plumber's gas pressure meter though.

"They did find something blocking the hose on the plumber's gas pressure meter though."

Of all the laughs from Dabbsy's article, for some reason that caused the biggest! :D

I wonder how clicking with a hammer would go. It should silence the unwanted dialogs from popping up any time soon thereafter.

Maybe the toilet will also appreciate a little click with a hammer as to place misplaced items back into place.

A co-worker of mine once told me that however sure I might be that a gentle tap with a hammer was just what was needed to align a toilet properly, don't use that hammer. Porcelain does not handle hammers well. (His family seems to have been hard on toilets: a brother-in-law had accidentally shot a toilet in his parents' house--toilets tolerate bullets even less that hammer taps, I gather.)

The guy who recently came to fix the air-con on my car discovered the same thing about condensers. It doesn't matter how simple it might seem to just gently tap it into position, rather than wrestling with the corroded brackets on the underside of a car, you're running the risk of turning a profitable job into a loss-making one when you have to replace a £150 part at your own expense.

Oh yes. I, too, have had a man fix this or that thing. They inevitably turn up with one or two pieces of equipment, usually an angle grinder or a pair of worn out pliers (or is it a worn out pair of pliers?), proceeding to borrow from me the exact instruments they need to discarge their profession but are in no posession of, whereas I usually am, courtesy of our local Lidl's. Last week I bought there a roll of stainless steel welding wire just to be able to demonstrate to my acquaintances that, indeed, these are interesting times. Said professionals always mumbe something about my gadgets being consumer grade whereas their (non existent) equiment needs to be heavy duty stuff for real professionals, not these cheapo playthings, mind you.

I believe these men and women of profession are the true masters of the state-of-the-art supply chain management, just in time delivery and tools-as-a-service-to-the-serviceman-mfd-as-a-service.

We had a massive upgrade done to our hospital phone exchange - IIRC three engineers, down time planned, the works. Twenty minutes or so into the upgrade - "Excuse me AC, can I borrow a screwdriver?"