Just close it entirely before you flush, people. The fact that there’s a debate between fully open and half-open when both are inferior is baffling.
Counter point: I know plenty of people who close the lid and then flush, then leave. So when you open the toilet you’re greeted by a floater or shit streaks over the bowl.
I flush with it open, check if it’s clean (otherwise use the brush and flush again) then leave.
If you want to close the lid you’d have to close it, flush, open it and check, clean, close it again. Are you doing that?
Counterpoint, if you leave the lid open, you’re flinging shit particles all over the bathroom, potentially onto toothbrushes.
Realistically they are going to get everywhere anyway, but I still close it in a harm reduction effort.
I’m going to continue to pretend it works lol.
So answer the question above, do you then lift the lid to check if it worked? Or do you believe your shit is magic, and makes all toilets work perfectly?
My friend, you either take some massive shits worthy of awe, or you’ve got a bad toilet if this is a regular issue for you.
I shit in the same toilets with enough consistency to know they do the trick without further investigation.
Sounds like that horror story about the wife seeing the dude wipe once and be done with it saying that he’s never had to wipe more. She requested he do it again and he came back with another huge ass streak.
Homie, we all leave some gross shit now and then but dude above preaches when you have people in your house who dump floaters and streakers constantly. Nothing worse than opening the bathroom door to know you’ll be greeted with a gross ass half dissolved usually green tinted floater with half the bowl streaked and everyone acting like it wasn’t them. Meanwhile you end up having to try to piss blast it for a week but it’s so caked on by that point you actually have to take the extra 30 seconds to use the toilet brush…
That was tested with Mythbusters. When your toothbrush is nearby there was hardly a difference if you flush open or closed, sorry :)
‘Hardly a difference’ and ‘no difference at all’ matters when it comes to ingesting doo doo particles. I opt for the absolute least amount possible… preferably none.
Ah, it had no lid, and unfortunately that part of the end-scene is cut off on YouTube. It was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb-_KRh8asM
The control toothbrushes outside the bathroom had the same amount of fecal coliformes on them. That stuff is everywhere, it doesn’t matter if you flush lid open or closed.
Run this quick experiment for me.
Hold your toothbrush/phone/anything on your bathroom counter above the toilet, with the lid open, then drop it. Repeat the experiment with the lid closed.
Which one offered a more preferential result?
I’ve never in my 33 years in life dropped something in an open toilet bowl. My toothbrush is above the sink, not the toilet. The only thing I store above the toilet is a spare roll of toilet paper.
I avoid the non-preferential result by…well…not dropping things in the toilet.
I’m in my late 30s and have literally never dropped anything in the toilet that I wasn’t intending to.
Sounds like a personal issue; maybe try not to be so clumsy?
I had to present this paper for a fluid mechanics class during COVID and yes, the particles do spread. The radius of contamination was almost 1,5m.
Shared bathrooms in hospitals, rehabilitation centers, or assisted living facilities are used by patients who might be infected, thus making them a likely source of indoor cross-contamination. The pathogen-spreading potential of toilet flushes was investigated in toilets seeded with microorganisms that were later recovered from surfaces and in the air after flushing. The organisms in the bowl could not be fully cleared even after repeated flushing, and the droplets produced by flushing harbored the organisms that were used for seeding, which remained airborne and viable.
Recently, Johnson et al. (2013a) investigated different toilet designs and found that up to 145,000 sampled particles can be produced per flush.
Analysis of more recent data revealed that a large number of droplet emissions are not visible to the naked eye (d < 100 µm) (Figure 6b). These emissions account for more than 6 mL and can remain suspended in the air for a long time compared to the larger visible drops (with diameters up to 6 mm) that end up on surfaces.
The larger visible drops settle on surfaces within milliseconds, whereas the smaller, invisible drops are advected by local airflow (on the order of a few centimeters per second). Droplets settling on surfaces can be tackled in accordance with surface decontamination procedures of local infection control protocols. However, no system or protocol currently addresses air contamination. Furthermore, usual cleaning solutions not effective in neutralizing the most resistant pathogens, such as the spores of C. difficile, may even contribute to their dissemination by effectively lowering the surface tension, for example, down to 30 mN/m, compared to water at 72 mN/m, increasing the local Weber number and thus promoting fragmentation into either more or smaller droplets, depending on the fragmentation mechanism.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-fluid-060220-113712
Source?
I’m pretty sure you’re misremembering that episode. It didn’t involve lid closed vs open.
Ah, it had no lid, and unfortunately that part of the end-scene is cut off on YouTube. It was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb-_KRh8asM
The control toothbrushes outside the bathroom had the same amount of fecal coliformes on them. That stuff is everywhere, it doesn’t matter if you flush lid open or closed.
Again, source?
We’ve established that you misremembered the lid test already, so I don’t see why we should trust your memory on this.
I’m particularly skeptical of this assertion:
the same amount
I’m well aware there are some fecal particles all over the place. But common sense says that aersolaized, shit-filled toilet water (which the video confirms it does spray out droplets into the immediate area) would accumulate more on toothbrushes sitting closer to the toilet than in another room.
Edit: also, were they testing by flushing just normal toilet water? Or flushing after a shit?
Because if it was just toilet water, then the test isn’t even relevant to the discussion.
https://mythresults.com/hidden-nasties
Many objects that people touch every day are dirtier than a toilet seat.
I’d surely hope those tests were done with actually in-use toilets, lol. The toilet seat would be sprayed with the lid down, so it’s a good indicator?
And here is the toothbrush one https://mythresults.com/episode12 (on the bottom). Maybe you can find the full TV episode, right now I can’t.
Either way, as long as you don’t have a vacuum toilet that sucks everything down you won’t escape. I just rinse my toothbrush with water every time before I use it, which seems to be good enough so far.
I could have sworn they tested both. I remember them concluding that lid position didn’t matter.
The toilet in the episode doesn’t even have a lid.
The human memory is such a fickle thing.
If you smell a fart you are breathing in shit particles. It doesn’t matter unless someone in your household is severely ill.
If you smell a fart you are breathing in shit particles.
This is incorrect. A fart smells bad because of gasses like methane, not poop particles.
(Also, relevant username.)
Neat, thanks for sharing that you don’t care how much shit you ingest. I’ll reduce my intake where I can, thanks.
A little bit of shit is good for your immune system. I’m microdosing on feces to stay strong and healthy.
Okay germaphobe
They said, with a literal shit-eating grin.
Yes I am doing that because I’m not a lazy savage
Get a bidet that sprays the bowl before you shit. You’ll hardly get any streaks ever.
I am doing that, yes.
You should never flush with it open as the other commenter wrote. Flush closed, then check after ~30sec again if there is a floater or stains. I have a friend I needed to explain that if he flushed open with his toothbrush in the vicinity, he could just go and put the toothbrush in the toilet bowl, not much of a difference.
That just concentrates the airborne germs into a jet that shoots out between the seat and the rim.
SEAL THE EXITS!
That was tested with Mythbusters. When your toothbrush is nearby there was hardly a difference if you flush open or closed, sorry :)
No, they didn’t test open VS closed.
It doesn’t matter. You do whichever placebos you into feeling like it’s better so you aren’t stressed about all the shit particles you’re breathing and scrubbing on your teeth.
https://www.realsimple.com/do-you-really-need-to-close-toilet-lid-before-flushing-8558163
Ah, it had no lid, and unfortunately that part of the end-scene is cut off on YouTube. It was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb-_KRh8asM
The control toothbrushes outside the bathroom had the same amount of fecal coliformes on them. That stuff is everywhere, it doesn’t matter if you flush lid open or closed.
Damn that’s new for me. Glad I have them in the cabinet anyway but this sucks
Counter point: close the lid to prevent things from accidentally falling in.
That also stops the spread of aerosolized fecal matter.
How strong is your toilet’s flush? Most toilets don’t use high pressure water.
Doesn’t need to be high pressure to send up particles. Mythbusters did an experiment to see if toothbrushes kept in open air actually collect any fecal matter from the air and they found the toothbrush collecting fecal contamination even far outside of the bathroom. I’m not sure if they did tests with the lid closed.
Every time you flush a toilet, it releases an aerosol spray of tiny tainted water droplets. So if, like many people, you leave your toothbrush in the vicinity of a toilet, does that mean it’s regularly bathed in bits of fecal matter? MythBusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage uncovered the dirty truth to this myth by covering a bathroom with 24 toothbrushes, two of which they brushed with each morning — the others they simply rinsed every day for a month.
As experimental controls, the MythBusters kept two untainted toothbrushes in an office far away from the lavatory. At the end of the month-long trial, they sent their toothbrush collection to a microbiologist for bacterial testing.
Astonishingly, all the toothbrushes were speckled with microscopic fecal matter, including the ones that had never seen the inside of a bathroom. The confirmed myth unfortunately proved that there’s indeed fecal matter on toothbrushes — and also everywhere else.
It makese sense… for example there’s those ultrasonic diffusers out there which send a constant stream of aerosolized water droplets. All it takes to do that is a small pad at the bottom that vibrates at the right frequency (above hearing range in this case, hence ultrasonic). It doesn’t take that much and the extent it happens in the average toilet just isn’t perceptible.
Close the lid bc flushing causes little particles to go into the air and I dont want to breathe that
Sorry to inform you but that doesn’t help. Myth busters busted that in 2013.
There’s a recent study that also confirms this:
https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(23)00820-9/fulltext
Oh man, you uncovered a memory. The first reddit downvote I received way back when was on a comment where I mentioned that closing the toilet lid makes mold/mildrew growth in the bowl more likely, particularly in humid environments.
Luckily, there’s a simple way to avoid this. It’s called “clean your toilet”.
Counter counterpoint: Look before you sit.
For real, I’m not sitting down until there is a quick inspection.
#ScariestMomentOf2016
Oh sweet summer child
Put the lid down. Which is why it exists.
Once you have dogs, the lid becomes something you use.
Dogs or no dogs, put the lid down before flushing.
…and not checking if you need to use the brush? I would be divorced in a heartbeat. Or do you advise closing, flushing, and opening again to check if you have tainted the bottom of the toilet bowl?
Do you just manually lift the lid whenever it’s treat time?
Or a cat that discovered that toilet water is fun to play with 😒
Why do people want to look inside a nasty toilet in the first place? Why even INVITE the possibility of your deodorant, lotion, phone, or cat falling in to a perpetually open toilet? I’m a very lazy man, but this is too far. Close your fucking toilet.
My pet budgie did once take a nosedive into an open toilet. Luckily, it was not full of shit at the moment, and the bird was swiftly fished out and dried off. But yeah, since then I close the lid even when there’s 2 doors between the bird and the toilet
this is what it feels like reading a post from a mastodon.social user except they have a character limit of like 2 so instead of separating the #hashtags they will #PutThemInline #LikeThis so you get an #aneurysm reading a post
I don’t know for sure, but it looks like Facebook.
What the hell happened?
They sat on a toilet with the lid up and just put their ass in the toilet instead of not doing that.
… And then they relearned the habit of looking down.
When a female friend of mine used to come over she would often leave the bathroom door open and the toilet seat down with the lid up. I didn’t like that because my cat used to drink toilet water. Also, when you flush, particles of what you’re flushing go everywhere. The lid minimises this. They proved it on Mythbusters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFzgNSO6t6c
So I understand the feeling of someone not leaving the toilet how they found it when they use it in your home after being asked to stop it.
But mine was for reasons I’ve just explained.
You’re facing the toilet when you walk up to it. Surely you can see what state the seat is and change it accordingly? Can someone please explain to me why the toilet seat being up or the lid being down is stereotypically such a problem for women?
The post mentions it is at 2 am so our toilet tumbler may have entered the bathroom without any lights and just went through the motions.
Seems like a dumb thing to do
The first motion is to reach down and lift the lid. If you don’t feel the lid, you curse yourself for having kids, lower the seat, and sit normally. Then you close the lid when you’re done.
I hate to tell you but closing the lid doesn’t help. In fact your entire house is covered in a layer of fecal matter due to inside toilets.
The problem is women tend to sit without looking. So having the seat up results in this post haha
Are these women just… How to say this delicately… Dumb? Like you walk into the bathroom facing the toilet. You can’t help but see it. Are you telling me they drop their pants and just do a trust fall onto the rim? I’m guessing no. I think it’s a meme and women just don’t want to have to put the lid up before going.
As an older woman myself, I often have to pee in the middle of the night. I don’t want to wake my husband by turning on the bathroom light, which leaks around and under the door. Honestly, I don’t want to shock my own brain that much awake either, I just want to pee, wipe, flush, wash hands and go back to sleep. I can do all that in the dark. So yeah, pitch black in there.
Fortunately my husband never leaves the seat up. Our new toilets have the “quiet close” lids, so we can flick it closed, and see that the flush worked while the lid goes slowly down. Not in the dark of course but it’s just pee.
This is 1000% a thing and I would be shocked if the majority of women who have lived with men haven’t experienced this at least once in their lives. It happens just like in this post: in the middle of the night, you don’t turn on the lights and you just go through the motions without thinking because you’re half asleep. Not a fun way to wake up. Super jarring, kinda hurts, gets your ass wet, and that lip of the toilet is just generally a little grosser than the seat.
I mean, I’m a guy, I generally just leave the seat down 99% of the time and pee without lifting it. If there’s any drips or splashes I’ll just wipe it up. But every time I go in to poo or pee sitting down at night I always just check to make sure the toilet is how I want it. There’s no reason not to just give it a quick check.
Literally yeah haha
I am the proud owner of a 90’s era cock.
To keep it running efficiently I pee sitting down.
Why would I stand up when I could chill out for a moment?
Like, manufactured in the 90’s or being put to use in the 90’s?
He peed out his ass for the first couple of decades of life
Did his knees collapse? If my butt touched cold porcelain I would just stand up and put the seat down. How did he get sucked into the damn thing? Was this a vacuum toilet on the space station?
If you fall in, your butt doesn’t hit cold porcelain any more than your foot would hit a missing stair. It just falls through the unexpected space, and if you can’t catch with your hands quick enough it lands in the water. Sitting is already falling backwards, far as your balance is concerned. Especially in a familiar seat, you’re not poised to stand right up again mid-sit. Your center of weight moves behind your heels, and it’s difficult to stop. Your knees alone won’t save you, you have to pull your upper body forward, and on the toilet there’s often nothing in front of you to grab. Add in being half-asleep, in the dark, and it’s quite a rude awakening.
How wide are your toilets? Even if i lift the seat up and sit directly on the porcelain i wouldn’t enter the bowl, i’d sit on the rim and I’m not a particularly wide individual. Also if your knees can’t stop you mid sit then you should work on leg strength.
We get it. You’re thicc. You got the badonk. Stop humble bragging.
Oh I could definitely fall in ours and I have quite a fat ass, not sexy fat I’m just fat. Also it’s not strength, it’s balance. I lift my husband from bed to wheelchair etc daily, my legs are plenty strong. That’s also why he never leaves the seat up. If I were to fall in, it’d be my own fault. I’m going to try to find a link to my toilet, it’s pretty new. If I can, I’ll edit.
Edit: Here ya go. It’s a very good toilet, hardly any splash, everything just goes down.
You do have to be really careful. This is one of the ways you can clip through to the back rooms.
this is why I’m anal about putting the lid down. that way i get to feel superior and tell the women in my life that they’re the ones using the potty wrong
jk, i think i only care because autism, but I’m too timid to actually say anything and would probably be a dick if i did. i just quietly go in and close the lid after others sometimes. but like, not too soon after, that would also be weird.
I typically try to distract my poop as I’m going. “Time to go jump on a trampoline!” or “I get to greet the Pope next” that way it doesn’t get scared and run back up when it sees the toilet water.
I paid for the seat I’m gonna use the seat
