And if you somehow disagree with flushing it down if it is brown, I suppose I would like to hear about that as well.
Always flush. I have a septic tank and if you don’t make sure to run some minimum amount of water into it, it’ll get crusty and start to have clog problems. As long as we’re running water though it’s great for 8-10 years between pumps.
Better to just run more water when possible.Also it’s nasty if someone goes to take a dump and there’s piss chilling in there. If you get hit with Posideon’s kiss it’s gonna be double nasty. So you flush it before doing your business and now the net effect is zero anyway, wasting the effort. Blech.
Posideon’s kiss
I believe at that point it’s Pissideon’s kiss.
well, considering Poseidon lives in the ocean, it’d track that he’d have a kink for getting “wet and wild”
8-10 years between pump… As in emptying it or as in replacing the pump? Because if it’s the former then that’s way longer than it should!
yes, 8-10yr between emptying it. It’s a fairly large tank (1800gal iirc?) for a small family. The last time we had it done the local guy said it looked great and there weren’t any problems. so something must be working right.
however a rental with a smaller tank constantly had problems with clogging. find out tenant was from california and brought all their water saving fixtures with them and took military style showers so the tank never got any real thru-flow. plus was a very heavy tp user… yeah. gotta have water moving, put original fixtures on and told them to start throwing their tp in a trash can. no problems since.
Septic tanks should be emptied every two years, the tank might look great, it’s your drain field that will be ruined way more quickly. People not draining their tank often enough is the reason why municipalities have started just adding it to their taxes and taking care of it themselves instead of letting people contaminate their lot.
yeah that was probably true 30-40 years ago when small tanks without baffles and straight outlet pipes were common. if you have an old property that hasn’t had the tank replaced, do that. but these days bigger tanks have baffle separators between settling compartments, an output baffle, and a strainer on the output. you almost never get any solids going out to the leech field unless the strainer collapses and the input will clog long before that is likely to happen.
If you have to throw your toilet paper in the trash instead of flushing it in order to not have issues then yeah, you’re not emptying it often enough.
But hey, you do you and you deal with the issues, I mean, what’s a new septic system when you can save the equivalent of 100$ a year, right?
We don’t put tp in the trash at our family home and have no problems.
The rental unit has to because of the smaller tank (it has a ~900gal one or something) and it normally gets emptied on a 3 year cycle- as it had been for about 10 years without issue before this tenant moved in and problems arose because of their copious TP usage.Thanks for the advice though 👍
I have a friend with a septic tank, the system is old, probably long overdue for some kind of serious maintenance or replacement that they’ve been putting off because the town is doing some big expansion of the sewer lines and their street is supposed to be on the list for it and they intend to get hooked up to it, but no one seems to know quite when that’s coming. Their property also generally has some weird drainage issues and is sort of in a semi-wetland area, so their septic tank sometimes has a hard time dealing with things when we get a lot of rain, so they have to have a let it mellow policy sometimes depending on the weather. Most of the time the guys will just opt to go find a tree in the back yard.
Yeah drain field saturation is a pain in the dick when in an area with high water table or very claey soils. We’re lucky as our volcanic soil is coarse and just sucks water away so drain field problems are basically nonexistent.
Hope they get hooked up to city sewer. Sounds like their local area and well water quality would greatly benefit.
Always flush. I don’t want to drop a log and have that piss water splash on to me. Not to mention that it just stains the bowl and sometimes smells. Just flush, cause if I see it’s not clear water, I’m going to flush anyway.
Just a few sheets of toilet paper on top of water prevents Poseidon’s Kiss.
Exactly. It does happen; you’ll only do it once…
I live in a desert and have my water trucked in every 3 weeks at significant cost.
Flush every time. Piss smells.
How much does that cost? Out of morbid curiosity.
$166 every 3 weeks.
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Flush. Your basic water usage is absolutely miniscule compared to what major companies use. I’ll start not-flushing the day they start doing things to minimize their own water waste. I’m taking my hour-long hot shower, too.
I get what you’re saying but if the whole population of where ever you are does the same, then the water usage would be huge. and not sure if you were joking but if not, what do you do the whole time in hour long showers, jesus ! haha
tl;dr/conclusion: just flush your urine. this post isn’t accounting for the increased used of cleaning products caused by urine stains, so really all of these numbers are even lower than they appear. if you actually want to reduce carbon emissions and energy usage, your energy is better spent on political actions. and if you insist on reducing consumption, stop buying avocados and turn off your air conditioning - that’s gonna have magnitudes more of an effect than not flushing.
Let’s do the math. Average toilet uses about 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³) of water per flush *ᵃ. Flushing doesn’t actually use energy, but it takes energy to both
1) treat the water before it gets to your house and
2) to pump that water to your house
It takes about 1 kWh to treat 1,000 gallons of water (3.785 m³) *ᵇ. That translates to about 0.0016 kWh per 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³). So it takes 0.0016 kWh in order to treat the amount of water your toilet flushes in a single flush.
It takes about 3,300 kWh to pump 1 million gallons of water (3785 m³) *ᶜ. That translates to about 0.00528 kWh per 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³). So it takes 0.00528 kWh in order to pump that 1.6 gallons (0.00606 m³) of water per flush.
If we add those two together, we get 0.00688 kWh needed to pump and treat the water every time you flush. Let’s try and put that amount of energy into reference.
Microwaves use about 1000 watts (1 kW) when running. Therefore, 0.00528 kWh could run a microwave for about 0.318 minutes (or about 19 seconds)
Computer Desktop: Assuming a desktop consumes around 400 watts, 0.00528 kWh would power it for roughly 0.0132 hours (or about 47 seconds)
Toasting Bread: A toaster might use around 1 kW of power. Therefore, 0.00528 kWh could power a toaster for about 0.32 minutes (around 19 seconds)
So, let’s see how much energy we would save if every single household in America flushed one time less per day. There are about 125.7 million households in the US *ᵈ. That would translate to about 864,816 kWh per day, assuming every household flushed exactly once less than they usually do. Let’s put that figure into reference.
In 2022 the total US consumption of electricity was 4,271.88 TWh *ᵉ which is about 11.7 billion kWh per day. This means that if everybody flushed one time less (meaning 864,816 kWh less), it would reduce total energy consumption by about 0.0074%.
Bitcoin globally consumes around 150 TWh per year *ᶠ, which translates to approximately 411 million kWh per day. 864,816 kWh represents about 0.21% of the total energy spent on Bitcoin mining per day.
Air conditioning consumes approximately 6% of the energy in the US *ᵍ. Since we know that total US consumption in a year is 4,271.88 TWh, that translates to about 702.23 million kWh per day. 864,816 kWh represents about 0.123% of the total energy spent on A/C per day.
sources
a: https://www.savingwater.org/indoors/toilets/how-much-water-does-your-toilet-use/
b: https://www.esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/FINAL_EECI-WWU_TR001-12_Resized.pdf--
c: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/water/us-water-supply-and-distribution-factsheet
d: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410222
e: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_consumption
fairs man, you convinced me!
It still wouldn’t compare, fortunately.
And I’m a woman with very thick, long hair. I wash it, condition it, mask it. I scrub the budding calluses on my feet and moisturize, then I shave most of my body.
Granted, hour-long showers only happen once a week, because I only wash my hair once a week, so my everyday showers are more like 30 min, but you’ll rip those hour-long ones away over my dead body.
I only see one argument for not flushing urine, and that’s for the environmental impact. However, you also must consider that not flushing urine will force you to clean the toilet more often as urine will stain the sides of the bowl. Without a detailed analysis we can’t know which one is worse for the environment, but personally I will always flush.
It takes next to no effort to flush and it keeps the bathroom cleaner.
The more it mellows, the more it smells, especially if you have a healthy diet. The person following has to deal with that smell which worsens the moment the water is agitated.
It’s also a breeding ground, so you’ll be cleaning much more frequently.
Only if your city has directed saving water in a drought scenario should you be not flushing your waste.
Piss in the sink. Wash hands. Problem solved!
Delete the sink, hit hands, problem up.
It fucking smells after a few hours. If you have more than one toilet in your house, this can be a real issue if you invite people over.
I went through a period where I was under doctor’s orders to treat any fluid produced by my body as a biohazard. That meant any time I urinated I had to close the lid and flush twice. So yeah, there was no mellowing in that case.
After all the rain we’ve had this year, and having WaterSense toilets, it’s been a feeling of luxury being able to just flush that piss. It helps prevent yucky buildup in the toilet as well. But when we swing back to seven years of drought, I’ll start letting it mellow midway through the first dry winter.
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