Saniflo and toilet pull light switchs in my Loos

25 comments

livinguktaiwan5 years agoPeakD5 min read

A month ago I created the LooLoo Community to inject some fun into Hive. For those who don't know what this is about, you may have guessed from my post thumbnail 😃 As the community owner, I haven't got round to make a post yet, so here I go. My first post is to Show my Loo and I'm going to show you three at my place!!

En suite toilet 1

One of the things I always look out for when renting or buying a place is an ensuite bathroom. I hate sharing my toilet with anyone, yes even my husband, so it's nice that we can each have our own. So far I've been very fortunate, and in my current place, we actually have three toilets in a three bedroom house.

This is the ensuite in our bedroom, and has a very standard toilet and shower. The vanity unit and the tiles on the walls are a bit dated as this place is quite old, but luckily the toilet is new. That's the most important thing for me. The best thing I like about this toilet is the light. The window is very big, and it's low level, so theré's a lot of light flushing in during the day making it very airy as well.

The corner shower unit was newly installed when I moved in, but the electric heater is old. The pressure is really weak, so I don't use this shower.

Main toilet

I call this the main toilet because it's not an ensuite, and it's the smallest of the three toilets in the house. I'm standing at the doorway taking this photo, this is how big it is. We used to use this as the main toilet and shower until it broke. Yes, I know, that sounds absurd, how does a toilet break?

This toilet is called a saniflo toilet or a macerator toilet. It is normally installed in smaller places or when the toilet is far away from the mains drainage. The box behind the toilet is the macerator, it's like a blender that chops up the waste which is then flushed along a small pipe that connects to the mains. You can see that small pipe in the image above. The water from the shower is also pumped into the saniflo system and discarded that way.

Last October, the macerator stopped working. Originally we didn't know this was a saniflow toilet, and thought there was a blockage in the shower. We spent a whole evening trying to unblock the pipes, continuing with vinegar and bicarb soda the next day, but to no avail. Actually, I just remember I posted about it back then, here's

if you're interested in the chaos that evening. To cut a long story short, the saniflo has not worked since October, and since we have two other toilets and one shower we can use, we haven't replaced it yet. However, this work will be done in the next few weeks now. It's a yucky job, as the entire toilet has to be removed to get to the saniflow system at the back. I'll be back then with a LooLoo post update when we do the work 😉

En Suite toilet 2

And this brings me to the last of the three toilets at my place. This is the other en suite toilet for the spare bedroom. You can see this is all new and the decor is pretty basic but adequate. There's a standard toilet on one side, which personally I find a little bit too tighter than normal. I mean it's ok for me as I'm petite, but if you're a guy or larger size, you may find it a little bit squashed as the toilet is quite near the shower on your left hand side when you're sitting down.

Since the water pressure in our en suite is very weak, and the saniflo broke down in our other toilet, this has become our one and only shower now. Originally when I first saw it, I was not keen at all as I was worried the water will splash all over the floor. There's a bar at the top, so in theory I could put a shower curtain in, but it will have to be a very long one and it would look very ugly. Luckily the water splash isn't as bad as I thought, as the shower is very long. The only slight problem is when I clean the shower tray I get a bit of splash on the floor.

Unique in UK Loos?

Something that I never noticed in UK loos before is string pull switches. It's always been there and I never gave it a second thought. It's only when overseas friends came to stay and ask me about it, that I started to notice it. In UK, I'm told due to electricity regulations, they install pull string switches instead of normal on off switches for electrical devices like lights, electric showers and heaters etc. This is to prevent an electric shock with wet hands.

This string that I'm holding is to switch on the electric shower in my en suite.