No, seriously. A lot of the time after I use one, it results in some kind of mess with varying degrees of subtlety. It’s been mildly irritating for years and I’m starting to feel like I’m missing something obvious.
Are you supposed to aim toward the center? To one side? High? Low? Into the drain/water?
I’ve tried aiming near the side so that the stream hits the urinal quietly and has a low angle of deflection, thinking it’ll minimize splash back. But sometimes it seems like there are tiny droplets in a radius around the stream and some flecks will get onto the outside of the urinal, which is no good.
I’ve tried aiming at the deepest part in the back of the urinal, hoping that the intense splashing from hitting it at close to a 90-degree angle will be counterbalanced by the greatest amount of surrounding urinal surface in the vicinity, but this is too optimistic and tends to deposit a fine mist on the floor between me and my target.
I’ve tried aiming downwards at the drain, or when it’s the style of urinal with a standing water level, at the back half of the water where it’s shallow. This is loudest and probably provokes silent judgment from anyone else unfortunate enough to be using the bathroom at the same time as me, but it doesn’t seem to be especially good at minimizing mess and in the case of standing water, has a low chance of splashing an actually threatening amount of liquid back in my direction.
Perhaps it’s just inevitable that this particular plumbing fixture comes with a little mess involved. In other areas of life we are fine with periodically cleaning in our Sisyphean struggles against the various avenues where dirt and grime accumulate. But I want to be a conscientious user of shared facilities, damn it. And there’s only so many times a guy can discreetly wipe off his shoe with a paper towel before going insane.
Please help.
aim for the water or the colored mats… other than that it’s all the same afaik. if the urinal doesn’t have a mat, maybe carry one around in your pocket
“Aim”? What’s this “Aim” you speak of?
The only way I’ve ever known is to stand four feet back, whip down your pants and skivvies right down to your ankles and just firehose that sunuvabitch.
As God intended.
Oh, hey dude. Haven’t seen you since our office moved, was wondering how you’ve been doing?!
Same as always. Just going with the flow.
I found a spot to do it where it splashes into my eye.
[off topic]
Every once in a while I find a place with the old style chest to floor urinals, the ones with a bowl the size of a sink at the bottom.
It took me years to realize that these were designed so that a drunk could stand up and vomit like a gentleman.
This is what they took from us.
The best solution is to stand slightly to one side and pee almost parallel to the curved wall of the edge of the urinal. The goal is to get the stream to immediately adhere to the wall of the urinal and have friction slow it down as it curves toward the back, minimizing escape.
We theoretically predict and experimentally validate that when the impinging angle is below an invariant critical value of ∼30◦, the flow rate of splashback under human urination conditions can be significantly suppressed…
I feel like I’ve found my people. Thank you. This is incredible.
Urinal physics before GTA6
Stand as close as you can to the urinal without touching it. I saw this advice on Reddit a decade ago. Someone said their drill instructor yelled at them for not knowing how to piss, and made them practice using a urinal. It works.
Over here urinals sometimes have a little image of a fly inside. This is where you aim for.
It all depends on the shape of the bowl.
Sitting is always better though.
…man, don’t sit on the urinal: it just leaves a mess and leads to awkward face-to-face conversations with the guy standing next to you…
Yes, thought I’d see this comment. Sometimes it’s a bee.
Pee on the bee!
The only thing I’ve found that helps is if the urinal has one of these deodoriser mats. As long as you aim for the mat (coaster sized) there’s no splashback, and a fresh scent to boot.
You might think theres no splashback but I hate to tell you others will smell the spray from the deodorizer mat on you
Yes. And the awkward social situation is when they ask what I’m wearing, but I didn’t pay any attention to the brand of the urinal mat.
I don’t want that to happen again, so now I’m careful to take note of the urinal mat branding.
I miss urinal cakes. Not accurately named.
I’m ok with smelling like wild cherry for part of the day.
I like to aim for the little holes way at the top, where the water flows in from when you flush. I try to backflow my stream directly into the pipes. If you get it just right, you get this really deep, gurgling sound that emanates from the walls.
If someone is in the upstairs bathroom you’ll need to adjust for the highpotinuse
In elementary school we would count to three start the flow and then see who could back up the furthest while still getting it mostly into the urnal.
…ye gads, elementary school boys are the worst: we had gang urinals (big open troughs) and the shenanigans were epically horrific…
Taking this as an opportunity to share my hatred for American Standard urinals. Those pieces of shit are optimized to maximize splashback and their wall-to-floor ones were cooked up by the devil itself to make sure bathrooms have piss all over the floor when you use the urinal. I fucking hate American Standard urinals they’re fucking awful. Shout-out the fancy waterless round ones though. I don’t remember the name of that company but I love their urinals they work great and I rarely get any splashback at all from any height.
Also urinals without dividers are the worst!
Try a 22.5 degree downward impact about 45 degrees to the left or right. Pissing straight at the urinal always creates some backsplash.
Here in EU/NL most stalls have installed an aim indicator where splashing would be reduced. Maybe you can find some imaging if you Google for it
This kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urinal_target
[…] put pictures of bees in urinals and toilets. They served as a target, but also a joke about the pronunciation of the honeybee’s genus, Apis. Engineer and businessman Thomas Crapper […] in the toilets his company produced […]
Two puns for the price of one!
