Re: I first heard this story back in the early 1990s.
As Martin said: avoid whenever possible.
Just to add context, a few years before my story I was working at Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham. Pretty much all of the sewage has to be pumped off that site and the place was replete with Saniflos (which were always going wrong - they are not designed for use in public loos) and also had a large "industrial" macerator / pump set in the basement underneath the main public loos.
The day the place opened (fortunately I started there a couple of weeks later) this unit failed, and with thousands upon thousands of visitors thronging the place suddenly there was "stuff" coming out of the loos that should have been disappearing down the pipe.
One of my colleagues was tasked - by the company which installed the whole system - with climbing a ladder to access an elbow in the 4" that they suspected was blocked.
A couple of turns of a screwdriver later, and suddenly every radio in the building erupted with (I am told) a scream like something out of a cheap 1970s horror flick, as the whole vertical stack emptied its contents over my colleague.
Could have been predicted, I suppose, but for that and other reasons I (and my traumatised colleague - hello Matt if you're out there) have a severe mistrust of the things.
Oh, and Saniflo itself is a French company I believe. French plus electrics plus water. Enough said.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
