Sluggish toilet mystery, round 2, expert help needed.

[Egon]

You must have had a toilet for greenies that don't use toilet paper. Leaves don't stick as bad going through the trap.ree

I bet you are glad that problem is solved.

Leaves??? Greenies like comfort. Moss does provide this. Beats TP anyday.

 

[MossRoad]

No I don't.

 

[Soundguy]

My wife went to china/nepal/tibet/indonesia recently. Pretty mucht he same deal with a few exceptions. Bali was very 'western'.

She also went to thialand , also nice. but burma... not so nice..

We were in China a month ago and the plumbing was interesting. :laughing:

The first part of the trip was an over night stay in a very nice hotel in Hong Kong before going to a part of China not seen by many westerners. The toilets in Hong Kong were interesting because they did not appear to have a water trap/S bend. Instead, the waste pipe went out the back of the toilet not down and the waste pipe was about 6 inches in diameter. When the toilet was flushed it used LOTS of water. The shower head was most certainly NOT low flow and it would fill the shower basin with water. The toilet and shower were really wasteful and the wife and I both commented on the water usage. Afterall, Waste Not Want Not. :laughing:

The hotels in China had sit down toilets thank goodness and the plumbing was about the same as in HK. Lots of water usage. Both hotels had TP. :thumbsup:

In mainland China you drink bottled or filtered water in SOME restaurants, you do not drink from the tap. The water from the plumbing was clear and did not stink but you did not take your chances. WeI did take a UV water purifier which we did not have to use but came close one night when we almost ran out of bottled water. They seem to have plenty of water just not clean enough to drink. Water in Hong Kong SHOULD be safe to drink but it depends on the plumbing system in the building which is usually age related. From what I could tell in the city we visited in mainland China, the water was from reservoirs in the mountains but I really don't know since we were in the Pearl river delta and there was huge amounts of water available but that water was NASTY! There are quite a few reservoirs but there does not seem to be many or large enough to serve the population.

I don't remember seeing a public water fountain during our trip.

The boat yard we were visiting had western sit down toilets but also squat toilets. The squat toilets were in out houses that were built along with the boat yard in the 50's. All toilets flushed into the river. The boat yard is next to a ship yard that are all carved out of the same facility that was built in the 50's. The ship yard is building and working on ships that are 200-300 feet long best I can tell. Ships used to haul gravel, sand, dirt, concrete, etc. We saw hundreds of these ships and they have to be part of the huge air pollution problem. One day I was on the boats we are interested in buying in the future and there was a huge smell of chemicals from the shipyard. It was so bad we went down below in one of the boats we were looking at to avoid the stench. That stench lasted for quite some time and I can't tell if they were using the chemical on a ship that just upstream or if they had dumped the stuff in the river. :shocked:

We went to McDonalds for breakfast one morning. What is sad/funny is that we went to THREE McDonalds while in China. :laughing: This particular McDonalds was in a city and the McD's was in a shopping mall but the mall was multistory building. The bathroom had squat toilets and it was pretty nasty. No TP either. :shocked: China is pretty green TP wise! :laughing::laughing::laughing: The public restrooms we saw had employees to keep the bathrooms clean so the McD's bathroom was not filthy but the squat toilets were nasty. The cleaning lady came to clean which was something you would not see in the US, and while I don't understand any Chinese to speak of, I think she let loose a pretty good stream of well deserved cuss words at the mess she had to clean up.

We did see squat toilets for sale at a business and they seem to have an S trap but I was just walking by and did not stop to investigate. Funny thing is that they had several models of squat toilets and the only difference seemed to be the bumps and ridges built into the toilet to keep one from slipping. :shocked::laughing: The squat toilets did seem to be a standard size.

There was a traffic circle we would walk by going to/from the boatyard/hotel and parked around the circle were usually a few trade vans. These vans were about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of a US mini van and were owned by families of carpenters, electricians and plumbers. Phone numbers were on the vans so you called them and they showed up at your place to do the work. Nothing unusual about this except the families LIVED in the vans. :shocked: We walked by one evening and the families were all squatting on the side walk eating dinner. When we walked back past the vans a couple of hours later, the families were somehow IN the vans sleeping. :shocked: Best I could tell they went to the bathroom in the landscaping that just happened to be at the traffic circle Saw more than one guy in the bushes. :shocked:

Having said all of that we never got sick. :thumbsup:

Surprised how much we noticed about Chinese plumbing. :laughing::laughing::laughing:

Later,
Dan

 

[N80]

I did some missions work in a small former mining town in W. Virginia. Small river ran through town. Train tracks on one side. Houses/town on either side. The river banks were covered in toilet paper. We did plumbing repairs on several houses and without variation found that they all drained into the creek. This was in 1996, not 1896.

 

[MossRoad]

There's a town about 15 miles SW of here that all the houses drain their sewage directly into an open ditch, that, when it rains, goes into (believe it or not) the Yellow River!

There's some EPA action going on about that right now.

 

[Soundguy]

Hmm reminds me of st. Augustine,

 

[xtn]

You mean that things don't just "disappear" once they're flushed? True story; when my dad was getting up in years and not really thinking so good anymore, he got a job being the janitor at the local rural library. After a few months, all the drains started backing up. They tried all the usual fixes to no avail and finally had to have a plumber in. They eventually found all of dad's rubber gloves in the main building drain line grease trap. Dad just couldn't understand why it would be a problem if he flushed his used rubber gloves after cleaning the restrooms.

(Sorry Dad; RIP)

- Jay

Why would the bathrooms feed through the grease trap? Usually a grease trap is on the output of an area likely to have grease in the drains, such as a kitchen, and then the output of that grease trap ties in to the main building output. In other words, the bathrooms would not be drained through the grease trap. You would have to buy a much larger grease trap to run a whole facility, bathrooms and all, through it. It doesn't make sense.

xtn

 

[JRobyn]

May not have been a "grease trap" per se, but was some sort of trap that the entire building waste system ran through before the main sewer line. When Dad told the story on himself, he called it a grease trap.

- Jay

 

[Egon]

Wonder where the sewage from all the big coastal cities goes?

 

[MossRoad]

Fukushima.