This is in competition with my brown paper bag idea, and is in response to a scoff I scoffed there at the odious WC, with its nauseating gases, which one couldn't extract by fan.

Having snorted derisively at this watery, stinky contrivance and walked back over to the main index, I stopped and thought, "Why not?"

Why not put an extractor fan in the bowl of a WC to remove some of the horrors and contaminants of its atmosphere?

The obvious reason why not is that electricity and water mix in too exciting a manner; but there are plenty of safe spots in even an unmodified bowl, and then the bowl could also eg be lengthened to accommodate the fan.

Yes, it's possible to put a fan through the ceiling or wall, but the problem with that is you breathe the gases a few times before you vent them.
-- skoomphemph, Mar 26 2014

Litterbox exhaust cat_20box_20exhaust_20fan
The same tyrannical principle. [bungston, Feb 05 2017]

All too easy for the shit to literally hit the fan [-]
-- Spacecoyote, Mar 26 2014


Shit hitting the fan would have some drawbacks, I suppose, but ducting in the seat, connected to a fan up the chimney could work?

Going one step further, a vacuum assisted toilet might help with constipation. Arrange an airtight seal (with an inflatable something at the interface between bum cheeks etc and unit). Sit down, lock in, bombs away, wait for the wiping mechanism to clean you up, wait for the flush, and then get up when it releases its grip.

All the while one could feed in a flow of something that smelled like a pine forest through the low pressure system, so that the escape from that room is done in less frantic haste than it's done today.
-- skoomphemph, Mar 27 2014


I imagined this today and knew that someone would have posted the scheme. It is a doable deal. One would trigger the fan by sitting down. Stops under the bowl would allow air to enter below the seat even if the user's physiology completely occluded the upper ring. One could vent directly into the stack, which is providently already attached to the toilet. The tube carrying vented air can be threaded through the passage which carries the water and waste.

This scheme occurred to me because 1: it pains me to vent an entire (albeit small) room full of costly heated air when one could instead vent one small appliance and 2: my in-litterbox aquarium pump vent works like a charm. The same principle should work for a toilet.

A question remains: where to place the pump such that it stays out of harms way?
-- bungston, Feb 05 2017


Fine idea. I have it on good authority that if one or more of these rim-feed holes get clogged with nameless schmutz, the flush can still occur. Thus: the aquarium pump dwells in the cistern above high water level. Intake tube is snaked out thru one water hole terminating under the rim. Exhaust tube is snaked out thru another, down thru the bottom of the bowl, terminating in the airspace on the other side of the U.
-- bungston, Feb 05 2017


If the pipes for the flush and the air extract are joined as an acute angled "Y" in the vertical plane, air duct on top with the common pipe angled down at 30° to the horizontal or lower, then water won't enter the extraction system.

The whole system could be cast into the ceramic of the pan at manufacture.
-- 8th of 7, Feb 05 2017


AFAIK the overflow tube provides a continuous air-filled path from the air space above the water in the cistern to outlet of the flush pipe (except during flushing). So a fan in the lid of the cistern should work. It would need a flexible or removable duct so the lid could still be removed.
-- spidermother, Feb 10 2017



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