How to Buy and Install Your Own Squat Toilet
U.S. squat toilet enthusiasts now have a domestic supplier: Blue Earth Ceramics makes the BEC-116BO Natura 16" Natural Position Toilet (bowl only) or, for the whole kit, ready to install, squat, and flush, the MD-Plus: Squat Toilet (complete with tank).
Further down the page I have links to some tools and parts.
I never would have thought this would merit mention in my collection of picture of the places I've been and the toilets I've seen, but I keep getting mail on the topic of, "Please tell me where I can buy my own squat toilet!" Well, with Amazon affiliate ads, now I can do just that!
Somewhat surprisingly, if you ask Yahoo or Google to search for "squat toilet manufacturer", this page comes up as one of the most relevant on all the Internet. That's due to all the meta-level discussion about the topic, including that previous sentence...
Well, that's nowhere near so strange as some of the web searches that people do when they stumble across this page. Yes, I have looked at the web server logs, and yes, they do show search terms used to find toilet pages with a search engine, and yes, there are an awful lot of really sick people out there.
Anyway, if you want a squat toilet in your home or office, there are two solutions:
- Buy and install a squat toilet.
- Buy or build some sort of elevated squatting platform contraption.
The first is obviously the far better solution.
If you live in the right part of the world, you can simply go to the local store and buy a squat toilet.
At left is a plumbing shop in Yangshuo, Guangxi Province, People's Republic of China.
Or you could ask a Turkish plumbing supply company.
Blue Earth Ceramics also makes what they call an "EZ-retrofit box-installation", basically a raised box about 12" high that puts the squatter on a small raised platform maybe 24" wide by 36" deep.
Toiletological correspondant Natalie pointed out that Parryware also carries squat toilets. Search their catalog for "Indian Pans".
American Standard makes them, but they're awfully hard to find in their North American catalog. You might ask Google to find a page mentioning squat toilets with americanstandard in the URL. Alternatively, ask your local hardware distributor to help you get it from them. I have seen American Standard squatters, sometimes labeled as "Indian Pans", at aecasia.com and productsasia.com, although in the second case you might just get a blank Service Unavailable page.
Zurn obviously makes them, as they offer a detailed specification sheet.
Sloan obviously makes lots of parts.
Squat Down Inc is a North American importer and seller of all sorts of squat toilets and components.
For those in the UK, Trent Bathrooms may be a local source.
If you plan to build your own, you might want to adhere to the U.S. Army official specifications. See item P-1a (WATER CLOSET), section 3.9 (PLUMBING FIXTURE SCHEDULE), page 15400-47, in this document. It includes the fascinating requirement that "Flushing shall be in conformance with FS WW-P541 with complete visual washdown from non-splashing flushing rim." and that the "integral, skidproof foot pads" shall be elevated 13mm above the finished floor level. Apparently FS WW-P541 is a U.S. military standard for flushing.
But maybe you can't have a proper squatter. Maybe you rent your home and your landlord doesn't want to replace the toilets. Well, you can buy a portable squatting platform that fits around a toilet like the one sold by NaturesPlatform.com. "It has a five-degree slope so that you don't have to balance on the balls of your feet. It folds up in 3 seconds so other family members are not inconvenienced. It is lightweight, but still strong and stable enough to hold a 300-pound man or woman." Too bad that 5-degree slope is not included in FS WW-P541! The Nature's Platform inventor and site's author claims, "The knowledge it presents has been described as 'the greatest medical breakthrough of all times.'" Strange, I would have thought that the discovery of microbial transmission of disease, development of immunization, discovery of penicillin, and a nearly complete elimination of smallpox and polio would have ranked a little higher.
As for other parts of the world:
- The "Evaco" is built of Stainless steel and wood, and is made in Singapore for the southeast Asian market.
- The "In-Lieu" is built of plastic by the Rotadyne company in Australia.
- The "Lillipad" is built entirely out of wood in New Zealand.
- "Squat pans" are available in stainless steel from Franke in Poland.
Finally, if you are like a recent correspondant who still could not figure it out even given all the above information and links to purchase the parts, and who apparently wanted me to come to his home and either install a squat toilet or build him a squatting platform, I can't help you.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
