The Electric Toilet

electric toilet

“If you don’t want your dog to have bad breath, do what I do: Pour a little Lavoris in the toilet.”
~Jay Leno

Most people that enter the bathroom will check for toilet paper before they begin their business.  Unless you want to end up sock-less, it’s just a good practice.  Boat toilets have added to my list of things I need to check beforehand.

Our boat toilet is electrical.  We need a pump to empty the toilet bowl and move the deposit to the holding tank which will eventually get pumped out at some time.

Well after dropping the kids off at the porcelain pool, I reached over and pressed the electrical button which would make all this stuff go away.

Silence, nothing happened.

A slight state of denial and a massive state of panic consumed me as I pushed and pushed that damn button, I probably said a few Hail Marys and asked God for a little assistance, but the damn thing would not work.

Sometimes these kinds of problems are simple, low power or a bad wire connection.  No such luck, this toilet was going to have to be taken out and taken apart.

I came out of the bathroom and asked Roxanne, “Which cup do you not want anymore?”

A sacrificial turd chalice was selected and off to work I went.  Logan and Roxanne thought that this would be a great time to go ashore and do laundry.

There are some items on a boat that are critical and there are some that are nice to have.  The freezer is nice to have but the toilet is critical and since it is the only one we have aboard, this contraption needs to be fixed.

After a two hour disgusting process, during which I passed through all 5 stages of grief.  Stage 2 (anger) was pretty fun.  A really stress releasing monologue of colorful words flowed unimpeded at the manufacturer of this relatively new toilet.

But after a while you just get to work and it turns out that a 10 cent spring inside the electric motor had corroded and no longer pushed on the item it was designed to push against.  I grabbed one of Roxanne’s pens, opened it up and removed the tiny spring, chopped it to size and installed it into the toilet motor.

It’s a universal law that if you unscrew or unbolt more than 10 parts from a machine that there is only a 3% chance that it will ever go back together again and work.  So you can imagine my amazement, as if something completely unexplainable happened, when I reassembled the toilet and it worked.

So now, before I drop the browns off at the super bowl, I press the electrical button to make sure everything is functional.  I have to, I’m not sure how many sacrificial cups we have left.