Love, love, love the toto S300 washlet. When the new bath was done, my hubby & son both thought it was ridiculous that I had the S300 installed....well, now neither will use the downstairs bathroom and I can't keep them out of the new bathroom. They particularly love the heated seat. I am planning on getting one for the downstairs bathroom as well. I'd say it is a luxury well worth getting....oh yes, and with 3, sometimes 4 people using the same bathroom - not odors at all, it is amazing!!!

When we bought our home in 1976, the master bath had a bidet and toilet. We had no clue how to use the bidet. It had no seat and "hovering" wasn't an option. It looked like a urinal to me. (being from the Midwest). I stuck a fern in it. A couple years later we remodeled and eliminated the bidet. This last Fall, we traveled for 3 weeks thru SE Asia, and in almost every hotel bathroom was a Toto toilet with a washlet. You just turned the little knob on the side and the water would come on (pressure to be determined by how much you opened the valve). After you "evacuated" a little thingie came out and sprayed "those parts" until you turned it off. You could reposition your bottom (lean forward) to wash other parts too! I fell in LOVE! Having had travelers diarrhea and wiping a sore bottom was not a good thing, but blotting was. No special piping, just a splitter off the water inlet to the toilet. Got home and looked up Washlets, and realized that in the tropics, the cold water is always room temp...HOWEVER the water in the states in Winter can get pretty cold, so that is why the washlets need so many more controls to determine the temp of the water spraying on those private parts. I still don't get how a bidet works. Do you have to do your "business" over the toilet then move over to the separate toilet? Do Americans take more showers than Europeans so "cleaning" those girly parts daily happens in the shower rather than over the bidet. I hope no-one thinks I'm being crude here...just very curious. If you have both a toilet and a separate bidet fixture, how do you use them?????? -Babka

enduring: "I have watched the Inax system work on their product video. I see that there is a separate wand for the feminine wash. Does the feminine wand get splashed with the used wash water?" The same considerations apply as with the posterior washing -- only more so. The feminine wand directs the stream at a shallower angle for a greater horizontal distance, so one might conceptualize that the amount of splashback (if any) would be less. Incidentally, a major difference between the Toto and the Inax engineering approaches to the posterior cleansing is that the dedicated posterior wand of the Inax directs the stream upward at a 70 degree angle from horizontal, just 20 degrees from vertical, whereas the dual function single wand of the Toto directs the stream upward at a 43 degree angle from horizontal, which is actually two degrees "more horizontal than vertical." The Inax angle makes for more efficient and thorough posterior cleansing than the Toto, but, theoretically, it also increases the possibility of backsplash contamination. I say, "theoretically," because we have never seen any evidence of it in actual use. "But it worries me about the cross contamination, not only from back to front (female), but person to person." In two-wand advanced toilet seats, only one wand at a time extends, so you need not be concerned about front to back cross contamination. We have used the facilities at Tokyo Narita Airport, Tokyo Haneda Airport, Kagoshima Airport, Nagasaki Airport, and Sapporo Chitose Airport, all of which are equipped with toilets fitted with advanced toilet seats (mostly, Inax). We also have stayed in public accommodations in Japan where the en suite facilities in the guest rooms included advanced toilet seats. It is very hard to imagine that such facilities would be installed in the first place and, once installed, would continue in use for years, if there were any field evidence of person to person cross contamination. "Over and over I hear that people love these units and state they don't know how they lived without them :)" Once you have used an advanced toilet seat for any length of time (say, more than a week or so), there really is no going back. This past summer, we spent four days at a resort here in the United States that had only (brand new) old-fashioned toilet seats, and we felt vaguely dirty during the time we stayed there; we also found ourselves conscious (to a degree that we never had been conscious before) that the other people swimming in the swimming pool with us had not been using advanced toilet seats in their own personal hygiene: that is an ironic unintended consequence of long-time use of an advanced toilet seat.

I bought the SW844 about 7 months ago and really like it. Im disabled and bought it for need more than just a luxury and I could not be happier. The one I have has the remote control, I highly recommend that, has the energy saver device so you can save power on heating water, the soft close seat, oscillating water supply...man all I need is an MP3 player and a flat screen TV in there and I could just stay. we ran the power cord down behind the toilet drilled into the vanity and brought the cord up and out of the vanity right at the GFI plug next to the sink, its hardly noticable. Its a real conversation piece when I have company also..LOL