New Orleans has this poo-odor problem as well. Whatever they are flushing in their sewers smells like lemons, and is supposed to kill the bacteria.

Can they not link up the storm water drains with the sewers, to flush them? That would be plenty of water.

Bleach isn't particularly harmful to the environment, it breaks down pretty quickly into water.

1. Bleach does not breakdown into water. It converts into other chlorine compounds including free chlorine gas (acid environment) and hydrochloric acid (chlorine into water). The bleach they're using is likely 12.5% vs. household at 5% and below. And no it's not going to gas anyone when it hits the sewer acid.
2. This problem is nothing new; hot, dry climates have seen this for decades. It leads to crown erosion and pipe collapse in concrete sewers.
3. I forget the chemistry for the H2S formation, it may be from bacteria starved of nitrates, but acid loving bacteria work together to form nitric (anaerobic) and sulfuric (aerobic) acid. Thus the crown erosion by sulfuric.
4. The only compounds that I remember being truly effective were calcium nitrate and magnesium hydroxide (MoM). I forget the exact cycle on calcium nitrate (see #3) other than it feeds the bacteria, but magnesium hydroxide buffers the system and makes the environment unsuitable for the acid loving bacteria.

I've drawn this from memory, so please forgive minor errors.

The 8.5 million pounds equals about 850 thousand gallons which seems like a lot but not when compared to the sewer flow. However, the first time they slug the system with too much bleach they'll shut down their waste water treatment plant. The same can happen with the buffer MoM. San Francisco's in for some good times.

Some of the newer ones are supposed to be decent. Alas, the ones in my house are 20 years old, and the plunger is not in pristine condition. Anyway, they are on my list of things to replace.

We don't have those here, but my work had to put up signs to remind my co-workers to flush at all!

Which reminds me, do young people today just roll out of bed 15 minutes to 9, get dressed and come to work to finish their toilette? From the odors seeping out of the men's rest room doors, and the gals in the women's can putting on their eye makeup, brushing their teeth, forgetting to flush and so forth, I think YES.

I try to get all my *business* done before I leave the house.

they make it sound like their is no water treatment system between your 'loo and the bay. What d'yer THINK they were using in the treatment plants? Dunno that the reporters bothered to actually figure out the system and it's workings before they reported this...

but yeah, it doesn't smell that good.

At summer camp there was a sign on one of the bathroom doors that said "Please flush twice - it's a long way to the kitchen!"

o.O

Pardon me while I wipe the egg off my face and say that I was thinking of hydrogen peroxide, that breaks down into water, not bleach. That's what I get when the baby's up 5 times in a night.

In our house, it's "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down." My kids learned that in jr. high when CA was in the midst of a drought. Oh wait, we're always in the midsts of a drought.

We mellow too. Its started when the twins were babies and we were in a small apt, and heaven help someone who flushed and woke them up at night. Now, I figure I save about 720 gallons a month not flushing pee. That's noticable on the water bill. Plus, who needs to flush 3 ounces of toddler pee? You can't even see it!

Some of the newer ones are supposed to be decent. Alas, the ones in my house are 20 years old, and the plunger is not in pristine condition. Anyway, they are on my list of things to replace.

MarkD,

You have the old style high water toilets? I would pay a plumber to refurb them -- not replace them. For that matter, short of damaged porcelain, replacing gaskets and internals can be done for ~$40 by handy amateur.

I am still trying to find a way to get my hands on some of the old toilets. Let me put it this -- some mornings my residue will exceed the water level and I have to flush twice.

As Nelson on the Simpsons says: HA-HA!

These elites try to impose on us what they think is best for us, but in practical terms, they're basically stupid half-wits who cannot comprehend that there might be unintended consequences to their actions. I certainly didn't see that one coming, but I bet any knowledgeable sewer worker did.

@momof4: I have cats that poke around the toilets from time to time. Letting it mellow is not an option in my house. :-)

I have that problem too mpetrie98. Also the reason I'm the only bachelor in the world that always puts the toilet seat and cover down - I really don't want to see an inquisitive cat coming out of there soaking wet - or possibly worse, deciding that if I'm going to mark that territory, they should too...

This is Example #57,329 of Environmentalists carrying out "First Stage Thinking", never considering the adverse side-effects on their mission to save the world.

By the way, Example #93,241 will be the "realization" by the masses that the curly CFL light-bulbs are an environmental disaster!

Oh boo hoo.

Will you Americans stop complaining about toilets and light bulbs that the rest of the world uses just fine?

In Israel we have a wide choice of European and locally made low-flush models that work fine, leave no stains or odor, and look nice.

Same laws are in effect in Australia and other countries.

Grow up America!

But water is not 'a precious commodity'. Water is available pretty-much everywhere, in mind-bogglingly huge amounts, for an absolutely trivial cost of extraction. Most places have a problem with too much water. The Ancient Mariner was right - there truly is 'water, water, everywhere. . . . '

The 'precious commodity', that we have too little of, is common sense.

'Low-flow' toilets are a combination of eco-insanity and hard-headed manipulation by local authorities - if you limit the amount of water used, then you can still let people build 4-bathroom mansions (= enlarge the tax base) while not having to spend a penny (no pun intended, for the Anglophiles) on enhanced infrastructure such as water treatment plants and so forth. It's a win-win for everyone - except the average user, of course.

The person who managed to persuade the average citizen that water is some sort of precious and limited commodity that we must husband carefully, is truly a dark genius who could sell iceboxes to Eskimos.

Just do this thought experiment - the amount of water required for every single lovin' American to flush twice a day is equal to a cube about 500 feet on a side. (300 million x 2 x 3.2 = 960 million gallons = 128 million cubic feet - a cube 503 feet on a side.) In the big scheme of things, this is an amazingly-trivial amount of water - yet we're all supposed to husband this like gold?

llater,

llamas

Ben David, no one said the low flush toilets didn't work, but that the sewer system was getting blocked - outside people's homes - because of the reduced amount of water going through the system. I'm sure the toilets themselves work just fine.

The point being that the value of the water saved is going to be outweighed by the fixes to make the entire system work again.

momof4 at February 28, 2011 10:35 AM

No egg on your face, I should have thought of H2O2. It is another oxidizer used in WT or WWT, and clearly what you were thinking of at the time. Easy enough to cross wires, eh?

As for Ben David, as Ltw pointed out, the actual problem is in the sewer systems themselves, not the low flow devices. If the gradients for these systems in the West, USA, are less than those of other nations because they were based on higher flows, then low flow devices lead to problems in the sewers, i.e., the waste deposits and does not get scrubbed away at peak flows. And that leads to high production of acids and H2S. BTW, when you see a TV show or movie where people go wading through sewers, realize that in the western US they would be sickened or dying in tens of minutes. The problem is that bad.

As for toilets and bulbs: we've had low-flow Toto silent-seats for a decade and they do not scour as well, they clog more easily (especially with children), and the pedestal egonometrics are wrong; the bulbs are more problematic as they are fluorescent and carry a higher, immediate environmental threat than incandescents, given the mercury and phosphors they contain, do not have a high life if used like incandescents, and there is no recycling system set up for residential use. BTW, I agree with these changes, but the preliminary analysis/infrastructure work was not done. Change by fiat is the proverbial road to hell paved with good intentions.

Let's see. We have: (1) toilets that don't flush; (2) light bulbs that don't produce usable light; (3) washing machines that don't get clothes wet, and (4) dishwasher detergents that don't clean dishes. I wonder how the federal government will improve our lives next.

llammas:
Water is available pretty-much everywhere, in mind-bogglingly huge amounts, for an absolutely trivial cost of extraction.
- - - - - - - - - - -
You must be Canadian.

In my area of the world - as in most of Africa, all of Australia, and parts of Asia and South America - water has been scarce forever, and remains so.

Last time I checked, San Fran was in California - a state whose politics and relations with other states have been shaped by the scarcity of water.

In Australia and other regions, water is so valuable that it is worth the expense of double plumbing to separate "greywater" from toilet water. And ALL of it is recycled.

What's loony - and expected - here is that the San Fran hippies were concerned primarily with the feel-good, self-congratulating part of the story, without having the attention span to actually hook up to California's water recycling infrastructure.... leaving that the for the Republicans who actually studied engineering...

@ Ben David:

"You must be Canadian.

In my area of the world - as in most of Africa, all of Australia, and parts of Asia and South America - water has been scarce forever, and remains so."

Sorry, but I call nonsense on this exceptionally-broad generalization.

All of Australia? Nonsense. There's the Nullarbor, to be sure, but large parts of Australia have a temperate climate with plenty of rainfall, surface water and aquifer supply. Other large areas of Australia have a tropical climate with abundant rainfall and - oh, look! - extremely serious flooding. You've obviously never been in Queensland during 'the wet'. Hardly a water shortage. The only places where water is relatively-hard to extract are areas that are very-thinly populated for other reasons - because they are very unpleasant places to live.

The Middle East has exactly as much water as it wants or needs to extract. It's a simple fact that you only have to drill for a relatively short distance almost anywhere in the Middle East to find as much water as you want. Same is true in almost-all of North Africa.

Guess what? Almost all water is already recycled, either by human intervention or natural processes. When humans do it, the results tend to be a lot better in terms of efficiency and cleanliness. Only an idiot would drink untreated water from a natural stream - most water in nature is horribly polluted (by human drinking-water standards). But water doesn't get 'used up' or 'lost' by any human activity - at best, we rent it for brief periods, after which, it is easily recovered for re-use.

This ongoing story about water as a "precious commodity" that needs to be carefully husbanded is (in most places and times) pure hogwash. With a few trivial and tiny exceptions, water is fantastically-abundant and easily obtained. The only thing required is the will to do so.

llater,

llamas

Yea, who cares about those pesky sink holes from collapsing aquifers

llamas:
It's a simple fact that you only have to drill for a relatively short distance almost anywhere in the Middle East to find as much water as you want. Same is true in almost-all of North Africa.
- - - - - - - - - - -

...except that overpumping has already caused salt water to infiltrate the coastal aquifers of Israel and Lebanon, and North African aquifers near large population centers.

Facts are "simple" when you make them up...

@ Ben David:

'...except that overpumping has already caused salt water to infiltrate the coastal aquifers of Israel and Lebanon, and North African aquifers near large population centers.'

OK, so you accept that your statements about "all of Australia" and "most of Africa" were excessive over-generalizations?

Good, then we'll move on.

Overpumping aquifers is a problem in some places, usually caused by perverse incentives that cause water to be extracted for uses that are either incredibly wasteful or simply perverse on their face - like 'making the desert bloom'. It's an issue in the Western US as well. But these problems, while troubling, are isolated and could be stopped tomorrow with the application of rational incentives. That's exactly my point - issues of water supply are usually never issues of actual water supply, but rather issues of social and political will.

I'm not advocating wasting water - far from it. I'm simply pointing out that obsessing about the amounts of water used to flush a toilet - even the toilets of 300 million Americans - is absolutely insane, because the amount of water used for these pruposes is - literally - a drop in the bucket of the easily-available supply. The fact that massive amounts of water are being wasted for irrational or uneconomic purposes doesn't invalidate my point.

In the US, much of this waste is driven by naked political greed. Farmers are damaging the Ogallala aquifer for the simple reason that the Federal government subsidizes what they grow, and they subsidize it because of the inordinate power of farm states in Federal elections. There simply is no other reason for it. That's what I mean by perverse and irrational incentives. I don't know how to fix that - but I do know that the damaging of the aquifer would not change even if we abolished flush toilets altogether.

The 503-foot cube of water that I described above, which is sufficient to give every living American 2 toilet flushes a day, is equivalent to about 3000 acre-feet of water (a standard unit of irrigation measurement), or just about a million acre-feet per year. The extraction from just the Ogallala aquifer alone (which only serves about 4 of the 50 states) exceeds 25-million acre-feet per annum, virtually all of it for irrigation by incredibly-wasteful methods. It's been estimated that less than 0.1% of the water extracted for agricultural purposes actually makes it to the plants. Other places do a lot better.

It's not the toilets that cause whatever water supply problems there may be.

The facts stand. You can get as much water as you could possibly need for the purposes described, and much more besides, virtually any place on earth, simply by sticking a drill in the ground, and not too far at that. Because some people have screwed up a good thing, in some places, for short-sighted or irrational reasons, doesn't change the facts. To say otherwise is like saying that the thin air at the top of Mount Everest means that there is a world-wide shortage of air, and we should all breathe as little as possible. It makes no sense.

You wanna go again?

llater,

llamas

I have low flow toilets in my new house and I have noticed that when there is more, ahem, "stuff" that needs to be flushed, you can hold down the flusher for a few seconds and more water will flow into the bowl to get rid of it. I found this out while cleaning one day. The reduced amount of water wasn't rinsing the cleaner off the inside of the bowl and I got pissed about it. It was kind of funny, it was like an "I'll show you!" moment for me and my toilet, like I was going to drown it or something. I still hate them, they do seem to plug up more often, but I've noticed the mess doesn't overflow when they do.

"These elites try to impose on us what they think is best for us, but in practical terms, they're basically stupid half-wits who cannot comprehend that there might be unintended consequences to their actions."

Hmm. Like, move to the coastal desert of southern California?