How toilets work

By Chris Woodford. Last updated: January 19, 2018.

T oilet, lavatory, loo, water closet, WC, John, crapper, can—it's amazing we

have so many names for something we care to talk about so little. Toilets are hardly
the most glamorous of inventions, but imagine trying to live without them. About 40
percent of the world's people (some 2.6 billion of us) are in that unhappy position,
lacking even basic sanitation. At the opposite end of the scale, in Japan, people have
amazing electronic toilets that do everything from opening and closing the lid
automatically to playing music while you use them. Most of the world's toilets are
more modest than this, but they're still pretty ingenious "machines." Let's take a
closer look!
Photo: Like most new toilets, this low-flush model is designed to save water; the two buttons on top let you choose
whether to flush with a large or a small amount. Exactly how much difference that will make to your water consumption
varies from one household to another. An old-style flush toilet typically uses 13 liters (3.4 US gallons), where a low-flush
model will use only 6 liters (1.6 US gallons) and some models use only 4.8 liters (1.3 US gallons). If you save 7 liters (1.8
US gallons) per flush and people in your home flush 10 times a day, you'll save at least 25,500 liters (6700 US gallons)
per year. You'll save more or less depending on how many people there are in your household.

Flush toilets
At first sight, toilets seem quite simple: you have a waste pipe going through the floor
and a tank of water up above (called a cistern) waiting to flush into it when someone
pushes a button or pulls a lever or a chain. Most flush toilets are purely mechanical:
pull the chain and the cistern empties through the force of gravity, washing the bowl
clean for use again. They are literally mechanical because they flush and refill using
levers inside—and levers are examples of what scientists call simple machines.

Photo: Lift the cistern on a toilet and this is what you'll find inside. The cistern (upper tank of water) drains through
a valve in the center through the force of gravity. The valve and flushing mechanism in the middle is called the siphon.
The blue, balloon-like object on the left is a plastic float that drops when the water level falls. This tilts the white plastic
lever, opening a ball valve(sometimes called a ball cock) and allows the cistern to refill. As the water rises, the float rises
with it, tilting the lever and slowly shutting off the ball valve.

There's a little bit more to toilets than this. When you flush, the cistern has to refill
automatically from a kind of faucet on the side and the refilling operation has to last
just long enough to fill the tank without making it overflow. The "hole in the ground" is
more sophisticated than it looks as well. You may have noticed that toilets always
have a little water in the bottom of them; even when you flush them, they never
empty completely. Some water is always trapped in a big curved pipe at the base of
the toilet known as the S-bend (or S-trap). This little bit of water effectively seals off
the sewage pipe beneath it, stopping germs and bad smells from coming up into your
bathroom. The S-bend also means that the pipe running out from the toilet bowl
curves upward, before curving back down again. That means when water flows into
the bowl from the cistern, and drains out through that pipe, it has enough momentum
to produce a siphon (sucking) effect, which properly empties the bowl.

What happens when you flush?

 1. Press the handle to flush the toilet and you operate a lever
(dotted line) inside the cistern.
2. The lever opens a valve called the flapper (green) that
allows the cistern to empty into the toilet bowl beneath
through a mechanism called a siphon.
3. Water flows from the cistern through holes in the rim so it
washes the bowl as well as flushing the contents away.
4. There's enough water flowing down from the cistern to flush
the toilet around the S-bend (S-trap). This produces a
siphon effect that sucks the bowl clean. It also ensures
some water remains at the bottom of the bowl, which
improves hygiene.
5. The contents of the toilet are flushed down the main drain.
6. As the cistern empties, the plastic float (red) falls
downward, tilting a lever.
7. The tilting lever opens the ball valve (ball cock) (green) at
the base of the cistern (or on one side of it), which works a
bit like a faucet (tap). Pressurized water flows in, refilling
the cistern, and pushing the float back up again. When the
float reaches the correct level, the ball valve switches off
the water supply and the toilet is ready to flush again.

Who invented the flush toilet?

Although it's popularly believed that flush toilets were invented by an English plumber
called Thomas Crapper (c.1836–1910), it's an unhelpful myth, for two reasons:
flushing toilets are an ancienttechnology, and no single person can really claim to
have invented them (dozens of different inventors have been involved in their
development over the years, especially since Crapper's lifetime). Archaeological
evidence shows that primitive toilets using river water to flush wash away waste are
over 5000 years old and date back to something like 3000BCE. The two inventors
who have the best claim to our modern toilet-flushing system were born hundreds of
years before Crapper. Among his many other achievements, prolific Arabic inventor
and engineer Al-Jazari developed a flushing hand-washing device in 1206, while
English writer and courtier Sir John Harington (1561–1612) described a method for
flushing a toilet in 1596 in his article A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the
Metamorphosis of Ajax.

Search through the invention records at the US Patent and Trademark Office and
you'll find literally hundreds that relate to toilets and their flushing mechanisms. I've
chosen two examples from 1874 to give you a flavor of what you can find. On the left
(and drawn in plan view, from above), we have the self-disinfecting water-closet
basin developed by Jabez Burns, Charles Higgins, and William Higgins
("Improvement in Water-Closet Basins", US Patent#149,195). Their simple innovation
was to make the pipe that fills the toilet basin squirt sideways over a bar of soap, thus
disinfecting the basin and stopping any smell. On the right, you can see Archibald
McGilchrist's trap-less water closet ("Improvement in Water-Closet Apparatus", US
Patent#157,211). Unlike with an S-bend closet, there is no water trap to stop odors.
Instead, the flush mechanism raises and lowers a ball-shaped valve that seals the
waste pipe. A rising and falling float (I've colored it green in the artwork) operates a
valve mechanism (colored yellow) to refill the basin in the usual way. You can explore
lots more similar inventions with a search for "water closet" on Google Patents (it just
gave me 13,000 results!).
 Artwork: Two examples of 19th-century improvements in water closets (toilets) by American inventors.
Images courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office with added coloring and annotations by Explainthatstuff.com.

Composting toilets
Photo: Despite what you might think, composting toilets are just as convenient as flush toilets. They're also more
civilized, since you're not dumping your waste elsewhere and expecting someone else to deal with it. This is a
composting toilet at Kibbutz Lotan, Arava Valley, Israel (note the bag of sawdust and straw at the back to help the
aeration process). Photo by Hanan Cohen published on Flickr in 2007 under a Creative Commons Licence.

Flush—and it's gone. Toilets are one of those inventions we really take for granted.
Until you stop to think about the two billion or so people in developing countries who
don't enjoy the same luxury, you might not realize just how lucky you are to be able
to solve such a horrible little problem with a quick press of a switch. There's just one
slight difficulty: your toilet doesn't actually dispose of sewage: it just washes the
problem down a long smelly pipe so it ends up somewhere else—and it uses lots
of water in the process. Even in the world's richest and most sophisticated countries,
sewage disposal is a major issue. We still have dirty beaches, algal blooms on rivers,
and major health issues like shellfish poisoning caused by sewage pollution. Wouldn't
it be better if toilets could actually convert sewage into a form we could dispose of
safely and simply? That's the basic idea behind composting toilets, which turn the
stuff we don't like to talk about into compost we can use to fertilize our land. How do
they work?

What's the problem with ordinary toilets?

Photo: Despite millions of years of civilization, humans are still far worse at disposing of their sewage than animals like
these cows, who recycle their waste effortlessly and with no fuss whatsoever. Cows are natural masters of composting
toilets.

In nature, there's no such thing as waste. Leaves fall to the ground, rot down, and
fertilize the trees that dropped them. Long ago in history, humans would have been
just as clever without even thinking: all our "soil" would have disappeared harmlessly
into the soil and made things grow again in future. Unfortunately, when the Industrial
Revolution kicked off, and masses of people started living very close together in
towns and cities, sanitation became a major issue and a massive public health
problem. That's how we came to have toilets, sewers, and sewage treatment plants.
Now, sewage is still a problem but for different reasons. Water is much scarcer than it
used to be and climate change will make it even more precious in future. Do we really
want to use something so valuable for something as crude and basic as flushing
away our waste? Probably not. One solution to the problem is for homes to have a
separate greywater system, where relatively clean wastewater from things like baths
and showers is stored temporarily and used to flush toilets. Composting toilets are a
different solution.

What is a composting toilet?

Photo: A sophisticated composting toilet and the system it feeds. The toilet part is the white bit at the top. You can also
see the large black waste tank and a silver ventilator on top. Most of this would normally be hidden inside a building, but
it's on show here in an exhibition. Photo by Sustainable Sanitation Alliance published on Flickr in 2005 under a Creative
Commons Licence.

The idea is simple. Instead of flushing your waste down a pipe, from where it could
travel maybe several miles to a treatment plant, a composting toilet turns sewage
simply and safely to compost in your own home. Although there are many different
types of composting toilet, the principle is the same in all cases: the waste falls into a
well-ventilated container where, over a period of time, aerobic bacteria (supplied
with lots of oxygen) greatly reduce its volume (much like kitchen waste on a compost
heap) and destroy harmful pathogens (the bacteria, viruses, and so on that cause
diseases). The end-product looks a bit like rich soil. Some composting toilets
separate out the liquid and solid wastes, both of which may be suitable for use as
"humanure" garden compost (though not for growing food). Generally, composting
toilets can also be used to dispose of food waste and other materials you might put
on your compost heap.

Composting toilets vary greatly in sophistication. At the simplest end, it's perfectly
possible (subject to all the usual planning rules and regulations) to build your own
composting toilet using a few bits of wood and a shop-bought seat (the
excellent Humanure Handbook is a good starting point). Next up come ready-made,
self-contained composting toilets that look a bit like traditional toilets. Instead of a
flush handle, you'll typically find a little bowl positioned near the toilet filled with
sawdust or similar material. You sprinkle some of this down the bowl to help separate
the waste and build up air pockets inside it to encourage rapid digestion. More
sophisticated models are electrically powered, with cutter blades to chop up the
waste, fans to aerate it, and heating elements to maintain reasonably high
temperatures and promote aerobic digestion. (Roof-mounted solar cells are
sometimes used to power fans, so minimizing environmental impact.) Other models
have rotating drums you turn to tumble the waste and help it compost. Bigger
buildings and public toilets use "fall-through" toilets where the waste drops down, out
of sight, into a much larger receptacle that can be emptied after weeks, months, or
even years.

How does a composting toilet work?

Real composting toilets are nothing like as earthy and hippie as you might imagine;
the most sophisticated ones look as sleek and neat as ordinary flush toilets and sit
just as happily in a contemporary bathroom. They're also convenient and easy to
use, with handles to rotate the waste drum and neat little drawers for removing the
composted waste.

Here's an example of a typical, modern composting toilet developed by Henric

Sundberg for Sun-Mar in the early 1990s. The diagram is a cutaway taken from one
of the original patent drawings, but I've simplified the numbering quite a lot and
colored the main features to make it quick and easy to understand.
Artwork: US Patent #5,345,620: Composting Toilet by Henric Sundberg (Sun-Mar), courtesy of US Patent and Trademark
Office.

1. Outer toilet housing.

2. Rotating waste drum (blue) with a gear mechanism (red)
attached to the back rim to make it rotate.
3. Mesh at the base of the drum so liquid waste drops
through.
4. False floor of the toilet where liquid waste collects and
evaporates.
5. Heating element to warm the toilet, encouraging liquid
waste to evaporate and solid waste to compost.
6. Composted waste falls through from the drum to the drawer
at the front.
7. Sliding drawer can be removed and emptied every 2–3
weeks.
8. Crank handle rotates the waste drum to encourage
aeration and composting.
9. Opening from toilet bowl into waste drum.
10. Toilet bowl mounted on top of opening.
11. Small gear connects crank handle to waste drum so the
drum rotates when you turn the handle.
12. Outlet pipe allows waste gases to escape.
13. Perforations in waste drum allow air to get in to
encourage aeration.

For much more detail, take a look at US Patent #5,345,620: Composting Toilet.
Advantages and disadvantages of composting toilets

Advantages

Although there are savings to be made on your water bill (a composting toilet could
save as much as 50,000 gallons of water a year), having a composting toilet fitted
isn't about selfishness, but exactly the opposite. It's a great example
of environmentalism: by disposing of your own waste, you're taking a more
responsible attitude and living in a more sustainable way for the long-term benefit of
humankind and the planet. You won't be worsening problems like sewage washing
up on beaches or nutrients overloading rivers, and you'll be recycling a handy
amount of nutritious compost for your garden! Another great advantage of
composting toilets is that they can be used in remote places where mains sewers are
not fitted.

Disadvantages

The main drawback of composting toilets is that they need more thoughtful use in
everyday operation. Just like a traditional garden compost heap, you have to be
careful you don't let the composting mixture get too wet or too dry; if the waste
doesn't mix up and compost properly, it will start to smell and could even become a
health hazard (a problem that doesn't affect properly installed composting toilets
operating normally). Also, you have to empty the container, periodically, though in a
properly operating toilet the waste you'll be removing will be dry and odorless, like
garden compost, and shouldn't be a bother. Smaller toilets without a fall-through
system and hidden container may leave waste on display, which can be troublesome
to some people. If that's a worry, opt for a different, more sophisticated system.

If you are planning your own composting toilet, be sure to check with your state or
local authority exactly what the regulations are on sewage waste disposal before you
start. You may be required to bury the compost in a certain way or have it removed
by a licensed septic hauler.