Monday 7/12

Flush

Have you ever gone to take a drink from a water fountain (always located near the restrooms) and you hear a toilet flush from within one of the bathrooms?  And then the water shooting out of the fountain you’re drinking from goes down momentarily?  Once the toilet flush has finished, then the water fountain squirts back at the original level?  Well, I don’t know about you, but I get a little weirded out.  I can’t help but wonder about the connection between my fountain water and the toilet water.  (And that’s usually when I stop drinking.) 

My default thoughts when this happens are:

Either the toilets next to this fountain use drinking water…

…Or this drinking fountain uses toilet water!

Do you know how water gets out of the faucet?  Water pressure.  (In case you don’t remember, there was already a post about water towers.)  There’s no electric-powered machine pushing water through all the pipes.  It’s pretty simple physics and gravity.  (Unless, of course, you think physics is unequivocally complicated.  Then it would be unequivocally complicated physics and gravity.)  Anyway, if the water pressure from one affects the other, then the chances are, they do come from the same source.  Yummy!  The same sort of thing often happens when I’m washing my hands in a public restroom.  I hear a toilet flush and the water goes down just a little bit. . .  And I’m momentarily discomforted all the same. 

Rest assured, though.  There is probably some sort of filter for the water that comes out of the water fountain.

…Or is there?

By: S. Cole Garrett