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What's the advantage of a portable urinal on a male-dominated worksite?

Hector V.asked 3 viewsUnit Types & FeaturesUrinalUnits per personConstruction sitesUnit typesService frequency

We have a crew of 40 guys on a six-month commercial site. Right now we have two standard portable toilets. The line gets long at break time. I'm looking at adding a portable urinal to the cluster to speed things up. The rental company says a urinal can reduce the load on the holding tank in the standard units, which might let us stretch the service frequency from weekly to maybe every ten days.

I need to know if that actually works in practice. Does a stand-alone urinal really cut down on the number of times the vacuum truck has to come out? Or does the extra unit just mean another piece of equipment to service, wiping out any savings?

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Carl D.Oklahoma City, OK

A urinal fixes your break time line, but it rarely saves you a truck trip, because the truck services everything in the cluster on the same stop anyway.

What it does change is where the volume goes. On my sites most of the traffic is guys taking a quick leak, so once a urinal is in the cluster the two seats stay cleaner, the holding tank in each one fills slower, and the paper and seat complaints drop off. That part is real.

Stretching to every ten days is where I would be careful. The driver still has to pump the urinal, restock, and clean all three units, so you have not removed a visit, you have just spread the load. And with 40 guys in summer heat, a week is about as long as I let a seat go before it gets nasty. Keeping units sanitary is on you either way.

On the count side, OSHA 1926.51 Table D-1 calls for 1 seat and 1 urinal per 40 workers once you are over 20, and where no women use them, urinals can stand in for seats as long as seats do not drop below two thirds of the minimum. Two seats plus a urinal keeps you covered.

I would add the urinal and keep weekly service frequency until you see how full things actually run.

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