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Comment by danw1979 | Hacker News Reader

danw1979

The recent introduction, in the UK at least, of splash-back reducing urinal … mats (?) has basically solved the problem in my opinion. They’re a disposable (but not single use…) plastic freshening insert with loads of short rubber strands, closely packed.

You can pee on one of these mats and the stream almost aerates itself on impact and you get basically no splashback, I guess with a similar mechanism to how an aerating tap produces a stream of water that doesn’t splash off whatever it hits.

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We've had those in the US for several years now, and they work really well.

I did encounter an upside-down one yesterday. That was... counterproductive.

I was on a work trip to Indianapolis last week and encountered two separate urinals with plastic screens branded by the same supplier. One screen was branded so that the plastic fingers point towards the user, one was branded so that the plastic fingers pointed towards the drain (i.e. the wrong way).

Makes me wonder why. Was that a misprint? Did someone get confused about the correct direction for the fingers?

My hunch. The plastic fingers pointing up will reduce splash when our urine hits them first time, but if the bottom of the urinal is flat, the plastic will stick to it causing the urine flow to be slow, and due to capillary action, the urine rises above the fingers and causes splash again a few seconds into our urine passing.

If the fingers are pointed downward, the urine seeping through the downward fingers can flow freely to the outlet, and causes less splash with the urine rising through capillary action. The holes on the plastic layer will anyway avoid the urine splashing when we point our pipe against it.

An upside down urinal thing? I'd assume they're double sided..

Just flip it over.

The number of places I've encountered these upside-down is mind-boggling

In my cleaning and maintenance work I'd replaced a lot of these. The orange ones I'm familiar with have a decently nice scent.

But last week I went to use my new shampoo and it had the same scent. On its own it would be nice enough but all I could smell was piss. Then I forgot and tried the same shampoo again a few days later to the same effect!

And those, when they have a target on them (like football theme often seen in pubs in Europe) kinda combine the igNobel prize with the "Nobel" [0] prize on nudge !

[0] not a nobel prize but the prize of the swedish bank in memory of ...

Yes this is the best solution I've seen. And every male pretty quickly figures out that the angle of the stream greatly affects splashback. Seems rather wasteful to spend money on this study for a solved/non-problem.

The worst urinal which I used was in Brussels about 15 years ago, and with that "splash-back reducing" mat. And it covered every part of the inner wall of the urinal. The mat caused the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. It made it worse, and I had to wash my shorts, because it started to smell disgusting the next day.

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