The Pitfalls of Waterless Urinals

In the past decade, there has been a shift in how we treat the earth. Protect the environment, save the trees, so on and so forth. I'm not against being environmentally friendly, but sometimes it's taken way too far. Naturally with this kind of environmental craze, people are going to come up with products that consumers will buy based on "going green". One of the more popular eco-friendly products in the plumbing industry is the waterless urinal. People will tell you that you save all this water and reduce maintenance cost, when that isn't really the case. Today, we're going to be talking about the pitfalls of waterless urinals.



The Problem

So you want to conserve water. If you own some kind of shop where you have high traffic public bathrooms, waterless urinals might seem like a good solution to do so. The downfall is that waterless urinals are going to cost much more in maintenance than standard urinals. When you urinate into a waterless urinal, 100% urine is travelling through those pipes as opposed to water diluted urine. The problem with this is that the calcium from the urine will begin to build up around the inside of the pipe and harden over time. It continues to do so, making less and less of a space for the urine to travel through. After 1 or 2 years in a high traffic bathroom, there is so much calcium buildup in the pipe that urine cannot pass through the calcium blockage. This is when the maintenance cost kicks in. Not even 2 years into the urinal's life, the pipes have to be torn out of the wall because of the calcium buildup. So how can you be eco-friendly and cost friendly at the same time?


The Solution

If want to avoid high maintenance cost and be environmentally friendly at the same time, there is still a great solution for you. Low consumption urinals are the best of both worlds. On average, low consumption urinals use an 1/8th the amount of water that regular urinals use. At the same time, it dilutes the water just enough so that you don't have the same rapid calcium buildup that you would normally have in waterless urinals.