😀 “That’s impossible because there’s no plumbing.” “We’d have to tear up the floor.” “It’ll cost 1 million yen.”
These are the kinds of things contractors often say when you want to add a new toilet.
Maybe your parents are getting older and you want a toilet near the bedroom on the second floor. Or you want to add toilets to private rooms at a care facility. Or your shop doesn’t have enough toilets.
There are probably quite a few people who have given up, thinking “I want to do it, but I can’t.”
Actually, that’s already a thing of the past!
We heard that a care facility in Nishinomiya has a toilet that turns that common sense upside down, so we went to take a look!
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We Visited a Care Facility in Tsuto Nishiguchicho
We came to a place about a 7-minute walk from JR Nishinomiya Station.
It’s the residential paid nursing home “ひなたぼっこ津門西口” in Tsuto Nishiguchicho.
Here it is on the map↓
The address is 1-18 Tsuto Nishiguchicho, Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture.
It’s a facility with a warm, welcoming atmosphere. But what we want to focus on this time is the toilets in the rooms.
Showing us around was Nishihira-san from SFA Japan, the company behind this groundbreaking toilet system. SFA is a company originally from France, and apparently it has a history of more than 67 years.
A Normal Toilet in the Room?!
This is a resident’s room.
There’s a toilet inside the room.
A lot of care facilities don’t have toilets in each room, and even when they do, they’re often portable toilets, right? The facility my grandmother was in was like that too, and the smell became an issue…
But here, there’s a flush toilet right near the bed, which must make a huge difference for the residents.
And it looks like an ordinary toilet, but…
Oh, is there something attached?
Actually, the wastewater here doesn’t flow down, it flows up.
Huh??? Up???
A Toilet Where Wastewater Flows “Up”?!
As the word “sewer” suggests, wastewater normally flows down by gravity.
Like this↓
But with this toilet,
the wastewater connects directly to the little white box attached at the back.
Inside this box is a pump with a grinder. That’s what sends the wastewater upward.
When you flush, the cutter inside grinds up the waste. Then, using the power of the pump, it forcefully sends it upward.
In Europe, it’s common to keep using buildings for 100 or even 200 years, so this technology was apparently developed as a way to add toilets without demolishing parts of the building.
Normally, sewage can’t go against gravity, but this one moves upward.
Still, with pipes this narrow, doesn’t it clog??
A regular toilet drain pipe needs a thick pipe with a diameter of 75 to 100 mm, but with this system, the waste is ground up before being flushed away, so a thin 20 to 25 mm pipe is enough.
I see. That’s why you can run the piping neatly along the wall without tearing up the floor.
Wait a second…
This hand-washing sink too?!
