The Contraption

As it's been known to be called

I recently moved across town, and my new apartment building is of the variety deemed "luxury," at least by aspirational marketers. (It's been perfectly nice so far.)

One of the luxuries available to me in the building is the luxury of being deprived of my ability to modify the plumbing of my toilet in any way. Specifically my lease states that:

Residents will make no alterations to their apartment without written authorization from the landlord...without limitation, no electrical or plumbing alterations (such as the installation of a bidet) may be made.

I am as big a fan of my TUSHY Cloud bidet as any you may find as well as a chronic rules-follower, so I dutifully emailed my request for permission to so alter my plumbing to the property manager. This request was, of course, promptly denied.

"Rules lawyering," or as it's better-known, "following the rules"

While I have many portable bidets (I keep leaving them places far away and then buying a new one), nothing can replace the TUSHY in my heart. I therefore immediately set about concocting a plan that would satisfy the two critical criteria at hand:

• Not just technically but straight-up properly and defensibly within the bounds of my lease
• Lets me shoot high-pressure warm water at my ass

Fortunately for me my lease also states that:

Resident understands and acknowledges that hot tubs, plunge tubs, fish tanks larger than 10 gallons, inflatable pools, water beds, or any other furniture or device that utilizes a large volume of water and/or requires a water connection or plumbing are not permitted in the Apartment...

Catch it? We have an explicit example of a kind of "water furniture or device" that is NOT forbidden under this clause: fish tanks under 10 gallons that do not require a water connection or plumbing.

Had I properly understood the physics of water pressure at this stage of the planning process I may have gotten sad and given up. Fortunately for me I am approximately physics-illiterate, so I instead concluded that all I had to do was connect the bidet to a less-than-10-gallon bucket of water held some feet off the ground and let gravity do the rest. I dubbed this plan "The Contraption" and was promptly mocked by my friends, who assured me I would doubtless flood my apartment.

Artist's interpretation of the author's original intent

Scope creep

However at the time I had better things to do, like all the rest of my unpacking, so I put the iron back into the fire to wait for quieter days. That took several weeks, but eventually I began to dream once more of The Contraption. This time, though, it finally occurred to me that maybe I should figure out how much water pressure would be generated by holding a 5 to 10 gallon bucket like three feet off the ground, and how that would compare to the amount of pressure the bidet was expecting.

Reader, I still don't understand how to calculate water pressure, but luckily in this day and age you can search "water pressure from elevation calculator" and type some numbers into a webpage. I am reasonably sure the answer is on the order of 1 PSI. Reader, after digging around for a minute I found the TUSHY Cloud's technical specifications sheet, and this bidet requires at least 11 PSI to operate; the full operating range is ~11-110 PSI. More was necessary.

At this point I started asking Claude if this idea made any sense, and he confirmed that, no, not really, but also that there were several options still available to me, including using a pump. This had already been brought up by some Redditors in a thread I came across while looking around for prior art in the space of unusual bidet configurations, but Claude contributed a suggestion for a specific kind of pump: the diaphragm pump.

A diaphragm pump, Claude explained and I later confirmed, is a kind of pump often used in off-grid scenarios like in an RV where you might still want water pressure. They're usually rated for potable water and have a pressure switch built in that shuts off the pump when the outlet line is fully pressurized, so it doesn't run when it isn't needed. They also cost under $100, which is good, because if I spent almost as much on a pump to run my expensive bidet as I did on the expensive bidet itself I might've needed to stage an intervention on myself.

I ended up finding a pump from VEVOR that was rated for wall power, came with a plug (rather than leads for wiring to a battery), and could do 60 PSI or so out, which was more than enough to get me into the operating range of the Cloud. This is still on the low end of home water pressure, apparently, but that's no big deal.

Implementation details

One order from Home Depot and a few days of waiting later and I was at last the proud owner of a small RV pump. Happily the outlet of my pump is exactly the right size to mate with the input line of the Cloud, so I didn't need any fittings to connect it. I tried to jury-rig an end-to-end test of the setup before I'd had time to get to the hardware store to buy a hose for the input line, but things weren't working for reasons I wouldn't understand until later.

"Later" came today when I returned from Ace Hardware with five feet of clear vinyl tubing. (I checked that it was rated for the pressure only after the sales associate cut the length for me. I would recommend doing these steps in reverse order.) The problem, in the end, was simply that I had been trying to pump water into the input line of the bidet without having the bidet on to do anything with the water, so the air in the line was blocking the pump's outlet.

With my heavy-duty extension cable and vinyl tubing making the whole configuration much easier to manipulate, I was able to get everything working in relatively short order.

Artist's interpretation of The Contraption

(why yes, I am running the input line out of the tank of the toilet, and yes, I am extremely funny for this)

And that's really all there is to say! It works. My ass feels cleaner than it has in months. Life is good. I still need to come up with an improved solution for holding the pump down, because it does vibrate slightly while in operation, but I'm not too concerned about it for the time being, given that it's in operation for all of two whole minutes a day. I also might stop running the line out of the toilet tank, even though it's very very funny, because I'm sure that toilet tanks have covers for a reason. (Alternatively I may lean in, we'll see.)

The lesson of the day is that there's nothing you can't do with the help of Chinese electronics and your local hardware store, but we all knew that already. The other lesson of the day is that if one outlet on a circuit has a GFCI, the entire circuit is protected, so don't worry about trying to plug your bidet into specifically the outlet that has the little button on it, just double check that the one you're using turns off when you hit TEST. Maybe we all knew that already too, I didn't

The kanji of the day is 雨

• Its Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course keyword is RAIN.
• Its readings are あめ, あま, さめ, and ウ.

I just think the little raindrops inside the enclosure are really pretty. It's also fun to me how this kanji appears in 電 (electricity). This is a deep cut btw, I'm several days behind on my Anki and therefore not currently learning new kanji. Wonder how that happened