New urinal designs
111 comments
·April 13, 2025wileydragonfly
We had that contemporary commercial in one office building, but it was slightly elongated. The splash back was horrific and unavoidable. Angle, distance, approach, absolutely nothing prevented it. It was so bad we finally had open conversations about it and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets.
The struggle is real.
potato3732842
At my employer we have an emergency location (glorified office) that we basically never operate out of except one afternoon a quarter to prove we can. The documentation about how to operate out of that site includes a warning to that effect.
Edit: Now that I think about it building has been remodeled so I should really have someone confirm if the warning is still valid.
0_____0
Why would you need an emergency location? Not bashing just curious on the rationale
potato3732842
Contractually required. Clients want assurance of continuity of business in case a meteor hits our office or an errant backhoe hits the fiber on our street. We use it for real about one day every 2-2.5yr. It's only enough space for the dozen key people we need to field urgent stuff.
Previously we had clients required us cross train a handful of key employees on their specific stuff so they could acqui-hire those people to maintain their stuff in the event our company went tits up on short notice (we actually saw them exercise that with a prior vendor). They no longer do that as we're much bigger now.
tgsovlerkhgsel
It makes sense to have a business continuity plan for various scenarios that could render the primary office location unusable (power outage, natural disaster, police closing the area for some reason, ...).
For many businesses, WFH or "everyone goes to the Winchester, we have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over" could be valid options, but if you want to have business continuity, having at least a small office where the disaster recovery team can meet and coordinate things from makes sense.
A contract for guaranteed priority access with a coworking space would likely be the easiest option unless you need some custom infrastructure though.
null
raffael_de
> and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets.
Did it occur to "some of you" that _sitting_ on a regular toilet might also be a viable option?
Asking for a friend.
afsdfa
The thing is, for men, sitting pee is only viable if *everyone* do it. As soon as a minority break this rule, the toilet is freaking dirty and you need to pee standing again.
At home though, 100%
Mawr
At home? Absolutely. In a public WC? Only in dire need.
steele
This is made a problem by people that insist on standing at a regular toilet or working through what I assume is a severe medical issue with reckless abandon for the next person
nsonha
just because some people have to sit peeing (cultural reason or otherwise) doesn't mean everyone else should do that when they don have to. The fact is that it has to "occur to" them instead of something they just naturally do.
lazide
Think of the quads!
jgyter
[flagged]
chasil
So, from the article, instruction placards reduce cleaning costs by 8%.
Obligatory nod to the infamous sign:
"Gents Please Stand A Little Closer, It May Be Shorter Than You Think.
"Ladies Please Remain Seated for The Entire Performance."
janalsncm
I’ve seen one that said “one step forward for man, a giant leap for mankind”. Pretty amusing.
physicles
Here in China, I’ve seen this sign dozens of times: “向前一小步，文明一大步”
One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization.
Cerium
I was going to mention - those signs are popular in Xiamen.
93po
if your hose is short or your flow is weak, please stand close to not wet your feet - some toilet in rural texas
black6
"Attention pilots with short pitot tubes or low manifold pressure: please taxi up close, as the next pilot may not be float equipped."
F Street Station, in Anchorage, AK
tass
Men can sit too
HideousKojima
And increase bathroom construction costs by 25-100% while reducing capacity by 50%! We don't have big shared troughs in sports stadium restrooms because of preference, it's purely cost and capacity. Urinals serve a similar purpose.
jillyboel
On a urinal? Gross, and you may be misunderstanding what they're meant for.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
> We propose novel urinal designs that were generated by solving differential equations derived from the isogonal curve problem to ensure the urine stream impacts at or below this critical angle. Experiments validate that these designs can substantially reduce splashback to only 1.4% of the splash of a common contemporary commercial urinal. The widespread adoption of the urinal designs described in this work would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility.
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/80987...
The experiments aren't in real world scenarios or with real urethrae excreting urine.
> A pseudo-urethra nozzle matching the internal geometry of a human urethra was used to “urinate” a controlled jet of dyed water onto urinals and the subsequent splash was caught on a large paper on the floor.
samaltmanfried
Anyone else here appreciate that this article appeared in a journal called 'PNAS Nexus'?
schrectacular
I'm glad you put your head out there and had the balls to say it.
schrectacular
It's nut lost on me.
giantg2
I hate to break it to you, but most of the urine on rhe floor isn't from splashback. Splashback is mostly solved with existing designs and splash screen/baffle inserts.
pcurve
I agree. The urine on floor is because people are generally less careful in public toilet when aiming, peeing, fully draining, and flicking.
When we're outside, we are generally more in rush. We had to 'hold in' longer before peeing because of line. It's unfamiliar setting with weirdly shaped urinal.
And in some parts of Europe, urinals are installed so god damn high, I almost have to tip toe and pee into the the air in projectile.
tgsovlerkhgsel
I think the "Cornucopia" model is a great example of "blind" design that works a lot better in theory/fluid dynamics simulations than it would in actual usage. I would expect a significant percentage of users to find the "hole" design... uninviting, and as a result stand way farther back than the simulation assumed. (Exhibit 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669248)
The best way to validate such findings would likely be 3D-printing single use versions of different urinals, mounting them at the student pub for one Friday evening, and monitoring usage amounts + the amount of urine on the floor mats (compared with a regular urinal next to it to account for different inebriation levels). This also avoids identifying models that men prefer/avoid if given the choice.
(Also a great way to advertise that "90% of patrons preferred the new urinals" because you'll get that effect from the novelty value alone).
voidfunc
Yea the cornucopia model makes me uncomfortable... sharp and o pointy angles and blind corners are not things I want near my dick.
BrenBarn
Appropriate that it was published in "PNAS Nexus".
irrational
> Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S.
Each day?! 165 million males in the USA. So, 16.5 males on average are peeing enough on the walls and floors that if it was collected it would be an entire liter? That seems unlikely.
What percentage of that 16.5 is not using public restrooms? What percentage is babies in diapers? Even if the number was as high as half, 8 men leaving behind a collective 1 liter seems way too high.
hn_throwaway_99
There is a "Daily Urine Splash Estimation in the US" section in their paper (I can't believe I looked this up). There equation basically makes these assumptions:
1. 56 million non-residential urinals in the US.
2. average of .22 L per "void" (a void is one pee session)
3. I think how they estimated average usage per urinal was weird and frankly wrong - they estimated each person would have between 3 and 6 "voids" per day, and each urinal would be used by between 1 and 2 people per day. Anyway, in any case that leads to an estimate of each urinal being used between 3 and 12 times per day. I think this estimate is way, way too high, because at the low end 3 X 56 million = 168 million, so on the low end they are estimating that, on average, every male in the US makes at least one public urinal pee (and, on the high end, 4 public urinal pees!)
4. Based on their data they calculate a value of ~1% (0.965%) of pee gets splashed onto the floor.
So you multiply that all together: 56 million * .22 * (3 on the low end, 12 on the high end) * .965% = about 350,000L on the low end, or 1,400,000L on the high end, so they said "on the order of a million liters".
Again, I can't believe I spent time looking this up and writing this comment.
dgacmu
I think you mean 165, not 16.5?
But probably, what, only 50m use public restrooms, but some use multiple times, so 150 uses / liter seems reasonable.
That's under 10ml of spray / spill per use, which is maybe a little high but not too crazy? I've seen some pretty bad spill results at work...
tgsovlerkhgsel
I think you drastically underestimate how much 10 ml are.
That's not achievable with backsplatter, that's called "missing".
thfuran
It's almost but not quite exactly two teaspoons, which is certainly a plausibly achievable amount, but as you say, likely not by splatter.
whythre
If you consider bar restrooms, that is probably skewing the average higher…
pbhjpbhj
The cone over the drain, and/or the spiked mats (both inside the urinal) seem to have stopped all splashing and be widely used in UK without need to change the urinal itself.
What one does find now is dyson-style hands dryers leave a massive area of spray. They seem to spray the water from your hands - and the water retained on the device - up into the air and across a wide area.
At our work place there are bench style sinks that spray water everywhere too.
And the sit-down toilets are terrible. I'm not an especially large man but it's almost impossible to use them without unnecessary contact. Sit-down toilets seem to be 'designed' by people who have no idea about their use by men.
BobaFloutist
A fun variation on sit-down toilets is when they're automatic and tuned such that they flush if you lean forward.
leoh
If only folks at Google’s Bayview Campus could learn to not piss all over the single occupancy bathroom’s toilet seats..
0_____0
Bit of a tangent but occasionally I wonder how close we are to people disappearing into cyberspace for 10 hours at a time and thus using a Texas catheter à la Neuromancer. It seems like there are a notable minority of tech people who regard meat and meat space as an annoyance to be dealt with.
How many of you would be happy at this moment to upload yourself to the cloud if it meant low latency, unmitigated access to computers, the internet, LLMs etc?
tgsovlerkhgsel
Not sure if that's the cause of the problem here, but this is why having urinals is a good idea and even legally required in some countries.
I couldn't care less about whether the sit-down toilets are mixed or separated by gender, but replacing most/all urinals with gender-neutral sit-down toilets yields results that suck for everyone involved.
petee
This seems to be an engineered-only solution without real world testing.
A person teetering wildly 3 feet above are still going to miss that narrow design. Or you have to hover and let your pants touch the rim, which also probably puts you closer to the inevitable splash back.
The only clear solution is to direct all splash back to the user so they can take it with them.
rr808
Even those dont solve the drip problem. The only solution is the ones with the grate you stand on.
Not sure how these are that "new" seeing as Toto (and I'm almost assuming other Japanese brands too) have had designs like the Nautilus for some years. One of the things that stuck with me a lot after a trip to Japan was exactly how thoughtful their toilet designs are. Public toilets with these tall urinals were amazingly clean in even the busiest stations and would allow you to get a good angle and not have splash on to the floor/shoes. Similar designs but scaled down were found in their newer Limited Express trains. Also, that angular design makes no sense, a human being will need to clean it and for anyone whos ever had to clean angular ceramics, they will know that that design will just be a pain to get proper clean...
I guess what I'm saying is, before we start researching new methods, why can't we be bothered to spend even a little bit of time to see what else is out there.