The Rise of the Japanese Toilet

Squat toils + bidet attachment is better than squat toilet and a jug for water. No dispute about that. Sit down toilet + hand held bidet attachment is worse than sit down toilet + bidet inside in the toilet without using hand. My answer was about sit down toilet with hand held bidet attachments; how Indians discovered these hand held bidet attachments.

Slightly dissenting opinion on these Toto wondertoilets, or at least retrofit toilet seats for western toilets.

I got one at a garage sale for $20. Hooked it up and tried it. Quite a marvel of features. Remote control (with config LCD menu on the back), heated seat, 2D aimable spray with separate male/female settings, warm water reservoir and what all. Every single feature worked, but:

It dripped water. I caught all that with a container and a towel while experimenting. Then removed it again and hunted for the drip, only to find that this is simply not built to western plumbing standards. The water inlet is just a friction-fit plug with an O-ring gasket, held in by a clip. Plastic on plastic. I replaced the O-ring with a new one, tried again... only for some other degraded o-ring inside to have been jarred loose in the process and water now leaking from somewhere inside.

Service manual? Spare parts? Nada. You can, however (from the US at least - I'm in Canada) ship this back to Toto and they'll recondition it to new for a reasonable flat rate fee. That's the only repair option.

After which it would probably not leak. But friction fit plastic-on-o-ring is fine for toilet environments that are tiled, "wet" areas with a floor drain. Mine, however, is upstairs straddling the kitchen/family room boundary in a house built out of sticks and drywall. Major leaks are simply no go. Would I leave something like this pressurized, hoping only that some friction fit o-ring-on-plastic interface is not going to start leaking unexpectedly? Nope. The same thing equally applies to the new ones, which are about $600 at Costco, or were at the time I looked.

So the "experimental" toilet moved on to another tinkerer friend who, maybe, will replace all the o-rings or have Toto fix it some day. I'm a gadgeteer, so I thought I could make a solenoid valve box to go in series with the thing's inlet, whereby you push a button and the wondertoilet gets water pressure for the next 5 minutes, after which it times out and turns off again. Just to remove the "come home to unexpected flood damage" factor.

Aside from that... "testing" of course under real world conditions. But... a nice warm water spray after the #2 business... shall we say does ... smell a bit. And didn't quite get things to the point where no toilet paper was needed afterward, nevermind the heated blow dry (which this thing also had). I'll stick to western toilets.

GFCI is another circuit breaker. Approx. no one knows this acronym. So if you know electrical jargon you certainly know this.

As mentioned in this thread I forgot the word ‘normal’ as in standard outlets are not allowed.

Tearing through the walls to install an outlet, priceless.

In Southern Europe (although these days I reckon it only has wide usage in the north of Portugal and Italy from my travels) we use the low tech version of this: a bidet.

While searching for a house to rent (and buy), that is always one of the criteria (in Lisbon - center of Portugal - they are not that common anymore).

It just seems so weird and unclean not to be able to wash ourselves after using the bathroom. I guess it's a cultural thing.