The Shit Ledge

OK, so we finally get here to Hanka’s mom’s house after a long 16 hours of travel and I have to pee. My first donation to the downstream inhabitants on the Vltava river. I am somewhat excited as I have some deeply rooted psychological attraction to releasing things from my body you know, pee, poop, farts etc… I step in to the lavatory (first door on the right as you walk into the flat) and I encounter a somewhat unusual toilet design. Over the course of my life I have come across quite a few different designs for toilets, some large, some small, some quiet, some loud, some gentile, some forceful and quite scary (like the one at my friend Carrie Flynn’s place in Fort Collins, if you got a good seal on that vortex it would suck your intestines out!) well anyway, you get the idea.

The design of this particular toilet is, in my mind, all about conserving water, something with which I fully agree. It has a separate tank mounted on the wall 150 cm (I am trying to get used to the metric system as it is not only what they use here but also a far more efficient means for measurement, so I use it wherever I can) above the floor mounted bowl unit that probably uses about ¼ the amount of water as your average modern American toilet. This might be no marvel by modern European standards but, considering that this building is 75 years old, it shows a commitment to conservation and saving money at a time when in America people thought resources would last forever. The floor mounted bowl unit has similar dimensions to your average toilet bowl, but inside the bowl is where the real engineering feat is located. This design is what I like to call: ‘The Shit Ledge’. Instead of being your standard ‘funnel type’ bowl design, this bowl has the opening, through which can fit even the largest of movements coupled by a ½ roll wad of paper without clogging, in the very front and is only 75 cm deep. The rim of the bowl drops down into a flat space just behind the hole. The water level does not actually come up into the bowl, but is actually halfway down in the hole or ‘Vltava Delivery Portal’. The aforementioned flat space is sort of a staging area, a runway, a launch pad, or even a display case for product prior to flushing. This is what I refer to as ‘The Shit Ledge’. There is a lip on the front of the ledge just large enough to retain the smallest amount water, like say, 250ml (Imagine the side view of your average drawing of a stomach and this is about what ‘The Shit Ledge’ looks like). This small amount of water, in my mind, is to minimize the infamous bowl streaking that can occur with to what I refer as ‘the unfired terra cotta crap’ and to reduce splash from the ‘fire hose effect’ of too much water. And as far as I have seen, it works. You sit, do some things, stand up and observe, proud to donate to all of the needy downstream individuals who anxiously await their ‘sanitary water’.

Now, not only is the toilet design efficient it can also lead to excitement and a sort of demonstration in physics. A sort of morbid, demented and lackluster form of excitement and experimentation I will admit, but as you can tell by this journal entry, I am easily entertained. When flushed, the water is fed directly into the back of the bowl via one large port by gravitational force. The tsunami resulting from the flushing action rushes down the bowl catching the product and sweeping it into the ‘VDP’ for downstream consumption. The scary(exciting) thing is, when the tsunami and product hit the small lip on the ledge, they actually shoot upward and look like they are coming out of the bowl at your feet when suddenly, the flow drops and pulls the ‘solution’ down and out of harms way!

The excitement is derived from the design relationship between the wall mounted tank and floor mounted bowl unit. You see, when you flush(and no matter how many times you have done this before) and the tsunami comes at you, you don’t really know if it is going to arc out of the bowl or not. The first time I used the thing, I actually jumped back. My heart must have been up between 140-160 bpm at least!

The demonstration in physics is a show of gravity versus force derived from the same relationship between tank and bowl. The force of gravity pulls the water from the tank(which is increased by the weight of the water) and into the bowl dislodging the stationary product and carrying it over the lip at the end of the ledge. The force of the forward moving water moving across the lip casts it into the air at an angle that looks to come out of the bowl when suddenly, as the water loses speed, gravity takes control again and pulls it down.

All in all, ‘The Shit Ledge’ toilet design is a positive experience here in Praha. If I had to come up with a pro/con list on the whole thing, I could only talk about one thing: While never again will there be a splash resulting in the need for a garden hose, I miss the satisfying shuh-BLOOP.