Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

If it's standard equipment, why wouldn't bathrooms be designed for it? New expectations? Something else?

Every bathroom in Thailand and Argentina is built with a drain in the floor. It's forward thinking construction. Otherwise, without the drain, either the bum gun or the bidet can and will easily damage the floor and anything below it.

These are called wet rooms, and usually they just have a shower that hits directly on the floor (at least in lower end ones outside of luxury hotels).

My bathroom in the USA does not have a floor drain. I have a bidet. The tile floor is 60 years old, no damage.

You can use a mop if your aim is that bad.

It seems wild to me you'd have a bathroom without a general floor drain? Like it's a room where we put water taps...a floor drain just makes sense (and you already need to put plumbing in for floor drains to have like, a shower work).

Most bathrooms in the US do not have a floor drain. In fact many are not even tile and might be wood or (heaven forbid) carpet.

How can a wet room floor like toilet or barhroom be damaged? They have to be specific type of concrete + tiles on top, don't they? At least that's what I'm used to.

Standard equipment in Argentina, not in Northern Europe or the US, where you would have to be in the opportunity to completely redo your bathroom to accommodate it. Otherwise you need to rearrange, or go for a Japanese toilet.

Completely redo a bathroom? The barrier to entry is replacing the seat with one that connects to the existing waterline. I've got one and it took 10 minutes to install - and 5 of those were just cleaning first.

For the spray nozzle sure. It would only work in particularly hot climates though, so maybe Arizona and Florida in the summer. There is a reason northern Asia goes without or with heated Japanese toilets instead (they also warm the water so you don’t hate yourself).

Bidet (no hand sprayer, just a toilet seat based jet) works fine in this US household. I don’t notice the cold in the winter. Maybe I have an exceptionally robust asshole, but our water gets very cold in the winter.

Do you have decent central heating? Japanese households didn’t (and still don’t, it’s not required by law even in Tokyo), so heated toilet seats and heated water is considered essential. There is a reason kotatsus never caught in the states I guess. You won’t encounter nozzles in southern China either because the winters are too cold and they have even less heating than northern China (which is why everyone is wearing winter jackets indoors).

Even in the US, I can’t imagine installing a nozzle here in Seattle, but we also don’t have central heat (just a heat pump with remote units in a couple of rooms).

> we also don’t have central heat (just a heat pump

I'm so terminologically confused at this point by comments like this. In Texas, many people's central heat is a heat pump. My current house's heater is the first I've lived at in over forty years that wasn't a heat pump (this one is gas). High end homes, cheap rentals, everything in between, heat pump central heating.

Ductless heat pump (aka mini split) you need indoor units to serve each room that the heat pump handles. We have one in our master bedroom and in our open living room kitchen, but not on the bottom floor (kid bedroom/office, and our master bath really isn’t heated well by our master bedroom indoor unit, so it has a separate wall heater that doesn’t have a thermostat so we never use it. So our bathroom is a bit cold in the winter, although it’s Seattle so never really that cold, although my wife avoids the toilet for the one in the living room since it bothers her more.

So…is a ductless mini split heat pump supplemented by a bunch of resistive walk heaters, one gas fireplace, and no central thermostat really considered central heating?

In China, this becomes even more pronounced, northern cities provide central heating from heating plants…so central means “central” in a much stronger sense. Apartments are poorly insulated from each other so it makes little sense to heat each unit separately. In southern China (and lots of older Japanese housing), you don’t even have good insulation so all your heating is localized (eg via a kotatsu and heated toilet seat, or heated train seats which are really nice). That is a lot less centralized than a minisplit (which are catching on in southern China these days as well).

I use a non-heated bidet in Truckee, California (near lake Tahoe). In the winter the water that comes out is cold, but it's only for a few seconds, so I just grin and bear it.

I think they're talking about a standalone bidet.

Most need power at the toilet. Not allowed to be exposed near water in US bathrooms without circuit breaker and so are not installed.

You should already have a circuit breaker at the panel.

A GFCI outlet is needed if your breaker is not GFCI already, but this receptacle is something that isn't terribly expensive.

Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. These are common near a sink but approximately never behind the toilet in home in the US.

Many bathrooms have a light switch close to the toilet. Hopefully it's 3 wire so it's easy to install an outlet a couple feet below the switch.

Aren't light switches and outlets supposed to be on different circuits by code?

No, not in North America.

It's typical nowadays for the whole bathroom to be on a breaker-level GFCI.

> why wouldn't bathrooms be designed for it?

No outlet near the toilet.

Non-conforming/non-standard shape of seat and/or tank.

Ideally you need nearby electrical and ability to get water to the washlet seat. Which is fairly easy/cheap in a bathroom remodel (which is what I did) but not necessarily easy/cheap otherwise. (There are simpler ways you can get part-way there as noted in this thread.)

...why would you need electricity for a seat with water?

https://www.totousa.com/tips/toto-washlet-electric-bidets

I'm not sure electricity is required for basic operation but at least most models are designed to be plugged in.

Except for the no-power versions, electricity is required for bidet functions on Toto bidets. They work like normal industrial hydraulics. They have a small low-power electric pilot valve, which lets hydraulic pressure into the right place to move the boom in and out, and release water.

The washlet needs power for the seat warmer (and other functions). Toto (and others) also have unpowered add-on toilet seat type that just sprays and is manually controlled with a knob. https://in.toto.com/product-category/ecowasher/ (Not sure if this is available in the US)

There are models that don't require electricity, but the higher end ones (that do) will heat the water before hit hits your butt, and also might have a heated seat as well as other features.

Because the Japanese implementation is electro-mechanical. The nozzle auto-cleans and deploy from the big end like a fighter jet refueling boom with press of a button, sometimes on a control panel, sometimes via an IR remote.

Things get interesting when the remote dies in the middle of the ordeal or the stop button could not be immediately located.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com