While casually using the restroom earlier today, I identified a multi-million dollar opportunity in regards to the auto-flush sensors on toilets. Fair warning, the description of how I identified the problem might be a bit crude.

Anyway, as I was standing up to wipe, the sensor was triggered and started to flush. Now, these toilets are the mass-use industrial types designed not to clog (easily), meaning the force of the water to help make sure of this is pretty great. So much so that as the level of water in the bowl gets towards the bottom, the jets of water continue to spray violently. Instead of this being dampened by the water in the bowl , it is deflected off of the ceramic confines of the bowl and (uncomfortably) onto your backside making the situation awkward, in a similar manner to this post.

This problem exists everywhere; airports, malls, every restroom at Purdue, etc. So what’s the solution? We can roughly model the rate of the water decreasing from the bowl when flushing, which means that we should be able to adjust the intensity of the water jets to correspond to the rate at which the volume of water is decreasing (related rates actually matters?), thus alleviating the annoying backwash / spray problem.

I’ll take 10% equity for the idea.