Unexpectedly Robust Discussion of Bidets and Toilet Construction

I’m also ordering a bidet attachment for the toilet since people are hoarding all the TP for some inexplicable reason. I’m told once you go that route you never go back.

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@Sam, you are the third person I’ve seen mention a bidet. I’m sold. I’m renting an apartment so am not sure I could install one, but I think I’ll order a travel one. That way I could try it out. It’s better for the environment and cheaper, too. So who knows, maybe I’ll even like it and decide to use it all the time.

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I’ve just been running a water hose through the bathroom window for years.

Is bidet water heated? That’s the only thing I hate about hose water…freakin’ cold.

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Oh you could totally install one of the add on ones they just fit under any standard toilet seat and T into the water line that’s going to the toilet… 2 minutes to install and they cost under $30 usd

Only the high end ones are heated definitely not the cheap add on ones like this

In the comments the users say they were also worried about the temp but apparently it’s not bad and gets everything clean enough you could eat off it

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I’ve been reading reviews and this is the almost universal consensus

We had one in our bathroom in Tokyo. That thing was the Ferrari of toilets. It had a temp control for both water and seat, would play classical music when someone is sitting on it. After you use a bidet equipped toilet, you never want to go back to the regular ones.

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Hmm, do you need to turn off the water to hook one of those up? I’m in a high-rise, so I can’t turn off my water myself. I’d have to ask my landlord, and it would be turned off for several floors (because I don’t think it can be turned off for just one floor/apartment in my building), and then they’d probably want a plumber to install it to make sure nothing was damaged…

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Well here in the US and I would certainly assume it is the same in Canada there is a valve right at the wall behind the the toilet and would just turn it off right there only

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Wow, I will have to check and see. Hopefully that’s the case! I have absolutely no experience with this stuff and have never gone feeling around back there. :slight_smile:

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That’s where we discovered them; a hotel in Meguro, a suburb of Tokyo. A company called “Coco Bidet” manufacture the ones we bought and they are comparable with the Panasonics in Japan; not as good because they are just swap out toilet seats, easy to install as @Sam says but not with the range of functionality of the Japanese ones.

Whenever we are travelling outside Europe it is one of the major annoyances; no bidet.

I should add that the room in Meguro was considerably smaller than any I other I have been in, yet it contained an extremely efficient bathroom, I think the best one I have ever used.

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When I considered using cloth diapers, I watched a bunch of videos on how to hook up a spray hose so you could hose off diapers into the toilet to contain the mess. It seemed pretty straightforward although I never actually did it.

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Interesting metric.

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I would almost bet the farm your toilets are set up exactly the same, it’d be almost impossible for them not to be

Ha ha. The setup is a unique feature of US, Mexican and most likely Canadian plumbing. In the UK the Crapper [one of my first wife’s heros] is directly plumbed into the hot water header tank, which is cold, being a header tank. So you have to turn off the supply to the header and drain the whole dang tank before you start fitting one of those seats.

Except, of course, you can freeze the supply pipe; a common practice in the US. Except, of course, you can’t do that in the UK because the danged supply pipes are buried in the plaster coating the brick walls.

And that is just the UK.

There is a God of plumbing and we are the tower of babel.

Wow… I’ve probably changed out… I dunno 30? Toilet valves and or floats And probably 7 or 8 whole toilets in the course of my home ownership… I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t have a valve right there to turn off the flow

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Toilet valves hardly every fail in the UK, well, at least compared to the US; I’ve had experience of both and the US approach is pretty much designed to fail. The money is elsewhere in the UK, so those things don’t fail, so the mechanism to deal with the failure isn’t required or more exactly can’t be sold.

The tech is utterly different. The failure points are utterly different. Every point of the delivery in the US plumbing system has a 1/4" disconnect valve to allow the thing below that point to be replaced. No such point in the UK plumbing system is even identified. Oh, but that’s not entirely true; US bath and shower supplies do not have such a disconnect. Follow the money.

[This is all irony: intended to present a contrarian point of view with a hope that people will think about what I am saying. I do say I would never before have changed the past by editing a previously comment and I am not sure it is appropriate now, but this is what I am doing.]

I had a house with 4 bathrooms and a water tank where our water came in by truck (and another house where all the water was rainwater collection… alaska issues). In both cases leaky toilets were not acceptable…

In the one with the tank I had toilets run and drain the tank empty overnight a couple times. They were american standard champion toilets which have a different than normal design… I called them and asked what I should do. I was amazed they overnight shipped me new and redesigned mechanisms to replace all 4… to Alaska! That must have cost them a fortune. Best customer service I’ve ever had… never had a problem with their new valve

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We stayed at the Park Hyatt for a week. I didn’t look at the manufacturer of the toilet. Our room was larger than I expected for Tokyo. The bathroom was exceptionally large when compared to the room.

Love the new thread and its title, @Chris! :joy::joy:

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