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urinal revived for the first time since '25
Wednesday, March 11 2026
It was another beautiful warm day, though it took awhile to warm up into the 70s after last night's chill. (With pockets of snow everywhere, the nights cool down quickly.) The woman we pay to clean the house arrived at around 9:30am, and I tend to hole up in the laboratory while she is here. This is something the dogs and Diane the cat do, and today even Lester was there, but only en route to the laboratory deck, which allows him to climb up to the solar deck, a place he enjoys as much as a chair out on the east deck. Today I saw him lounging on the roof ridge just below the laboratory deck, which is another favorite spot of his.
My laboratory's urinal, arguably one of my most useful and enduring inventions, is not without its problems. The main issue with it is that it is plumbed with only one-inch PVC, and that's, as it turns out, too narrow for urine not being regularly flushed out with water. Over time, crystals build up until the system becomes completely blocked. This happens at about once each year. In the winter, the system is also plagued by freezing conditions in the garage that it must flow through, and that also results in blockages. For these reasons, the system is frequently inoperable in cold weather. But I'm so in the habit of conveniently being able to piss directly behind my workstation chair that I usually start pissing into a jar (this year it's been a glass one that used to hold Rao's marinara sauce). I've been pissing in a jar for months now, but with the warm weather yesterday, I made a first stab at unclogging the system. I dumped some Liquid Plumr down the pipe and let it sizzle. I then used a special pressurization fitting for a small air compressor to force water down through the pipes. But all I could achieve was a trickle of flow.
Today I returned to the project, dumping more Liquid Plumr down the pipe. This time it worked, and I got that nice chugging sound that happens when flowing liquid lower down in the system pulls air through the piss-trap in the laboratory. I then noticed a fair amount of beige-colored sludge collected in the plastic bucket I'd put at the output so as to catch all the LiquidPlumr (you don't want that going into the environment unbuffered). But now my urinal was working once more and there would be no more pissing in jars (and then wondering what to do with the piss).
Then I had to do a fair amount of cleaning up from all the little spills (some of noxious fermented urine) that had taken place in the course of reviving the urinal. Aged piss is a clingy substance with a penetrating stench and it can be hard to clean up a recently contaminated area to the point where that smell is entirely obliterated.
This evening a warm rain fell from the sky as colder air started reclaiming the region for one last gasp of winter.
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