EP3763898B1 - Sanitary installation and associated corner-wing door - Google Patents

Description

The invention relates to a sanitary facility with at least one sanitary room containing the respective sanitary units with a lockable pivoting door, which can be locked by means of the pivoting door.

Sanitary facilities accessible to the public, such as washrooms and above all toilet facilities, should always present themselves to users as hygienically impeccable and also safe places.

However, this is very often not the case, especially in systems without a supervisor, since users leave the respective location in a more or less dirty state, despite corresponding written instructions, regardless of subsequent users, because they feel unobserved and not obliged to clean and actually in the usually remain unobserved.

The consequence of this is that such public facilities are entered by users with an uneasy feeling because they do not know before entering a cabin or sanitary room what condition they will find the sanitary units in and - what makes it even more difficult - often cannot tell whether a person may be hiding behind a door or a partially open door.

All of this leads to an overt or underlying sense of uneasiness and insecurity in users, which in turn means that such public facilities are often avoided.

An indoor toilet has already become known from the Internet under YouTube "toilet door glass", which should make it possible to assess the hygienic condition of the respective toilet from the outside without having to open the door. To this end, a self-tinting glass toilet door is provided, this door being transparent when the toilet is unoccupied and then coloring and becoming opaque when the toilet is occupied and locked. Switching from transparent to opaque is achieved by applying an electrical voltage with associated electronics.

Apart from the fact that this solution is very complex and therefore only suitable for high-quality indoor systems, this solution has the disadvantage that the doors become transparent in the event of a fault in the power supply or if the emergency release, which is accessible from the outside, is tampered with and thus put the user in an embarrassing situation.

Out CN 109208942A a sequential control of curved sliding doors of a sanitary facility designed as a round unit is known.

Out DE 15 54 348 A1 a wall body for separating cabinet compartments from existing rooms is known, the wall body being provided with doors through which the respectively partitioned cabinet compartment is accessible. A cupboard compartment can consist exclusively of angled revolving doors, which are assembled in such a way that each angled revolving door within the cupboard compartment separates a locker with its leg. If a revolving door is pivoted into the open position, then the entire locker box comes in front of the plane of the wall body and is therefore easily accessible.

Out DE 44 00 049 A1 a public toilet facility is known, the special feature of which is that it has toilet cubicles that are individually accessible from the outside and are separated from one another by side and inner walls. Thereby can the respective outer door can be designed as a swing or swing door or as a sliding door.

The object of the invention is to find a solution that eliminates the disadvantages described above for public sanitary facilities and, above all, public toilet facilities, which contributes to making the hygienic standard of such facilities verifiable for the user before entering and through the openness and clarity of the system to give the users a high sense of security as well as to prompt the users emotionally to maintain the high standard of hygiene that they find before entering the sanitary room.

Based on a sanitary facility of the type specified at the outset, this object is essentially achieved in that the pivoting door is designed as a double-leaf angled door with one wing made of a material that is preferably transparent over the entire surface and one wing made of opaque material, with the transparent wing covering the sanitary room containing the sanitary units in the closes unused or free state, and the opaque wing is transferred to the closed position corresponding to the occupied state by pivoting the transparent wing when entering the cabin.

The idea of replacing the conventional opaque swing doors with double-leaf angled doors with wings made of transparent material on the one hand and opaque material on the other hand, preferably arranged at right angles to one another, makes it surprisingly possible to find simple, robust and vandal-proof solutions both for outdoor facilities and for public toilets in buildings which, regardless of the effort made for the sanitary units provided in the respective cabins, contribute to increasing or guaranteeing hygiene and safety in such systems through transparency and the avoidance of room areas that are difficult or impossible to see into.

Since the solution according to the invention always results in a climatically sealed sanitary room or is available, access to this room can be direct. This eliminates the anteroom that would otherwise be required.

The sanitary room, which is always lit as required, can be seen from afar through the transparent door leaf, which significantly improves the feeling of being able to control the local situation, especially at night and, for example, in lonely parking lots.

The sanitary room can thus be checked before entering with regard to its condition or with regard to cleanliness, and the respective user is then also clearly aware that the room is immediately fully visible or visible again after leaving. This "social control" forces the user to leave the room in a perfectly clean condition.

A particularly advantageous embodiment of the invention is characterized in that the operating elements for pivoting, locking and unlocking the angled door are provided exclusively on the facing inner surfaces of both wings, with the operating elements being operable in particular as body-related, i.e. primarily by means of the hip, thigh or foot and actuating strips arranged preferably in the region of the lower third of the wings are formed.

The practical importance of these features becomes particularly clear when one realizes that in known sanitary facilities in which doors with normal handles are used, in the simplest case, ie with an entrance door to the anteroom with a washbasin, a door to the separate ladies/gents areas and a cabin door, at least eleven hand contacts with the door handles and locking buttons are necessary if these doors are opened and closed via the handle when entering and when exiting and the locking buttons are operated. Even after washing hands, the last two hand contacts at the entrance door are usually required.

Even if the room doors are automated, the cabin door alone still requires six manual contacts, namely open door with handle, close door with handle, close lock, open lock, open door with handle and close door with handle.

If you take into account that, as is well known, door handles are always the most contaminated with germs, ie also significantly more than toilet seats, then it is conceivable how high the risk of germ transmission is with the known systems.

In contrast, with the swing door according to the invention with the body-related controls in the form of hips, thighs or feet, the transparent door is practically taken along by the person entering and automatically closes the second opaque wing behind them. So not a single hand contact and no cumbersome "elbow operation", as is often the case, is necessary. The invention thus achieves absolutely effective protection against germ transmission both when entering and when leaving the sanitary room.

In principle, all types of known materials can be used for the opaque wing, but stainless steel is preferred in order to implement high-quality solutions. The transparent wing is preferably made of clear glass.

According to a further embodiment of the invention, the angled door can also be connected to an automatic drive which can be triggered by actuating elements and/or sensors and which can be decoupled for a possibly desired transition to a purely mechanical operation of the door. In this case, the rotary movement of the angled door can be adapted gently to the person entering, as is known from drives of this type. In practice, preference is given to mechanical operation, which has the familiar aspect of emotional security for the user. Furthermore, the two wings of the angled door can be designed so that they can be decoupled from one another, in particular for an emergency.

Another essential and preferably also used aspect of the invention is that the transparent wing is used as a control and actuating member for at least one sensor associated with the position of the transparent wing in its locked state and in particular lighting, cleaning, rinsing - Controls and/or drying processes in the cabin.

This use of the transparent wing as a control element also makes it possible, for example, to make up for a forgotten rinse and to trigger disinfection processes and the like.

According to a further embodiment of the invention, a cleaning and drying station is provided for the toilet seat of a toilet provided in the cabin, which receives it in the folded-up position and is in particular visible, which, like the pivoting movement of the toilet seat, depends on the position of the transparent wing is controlled.

A further advantageous special feature of the invention is that for unisex use without an anteroom or with a common anteroom, each sanitary room is designed as a unitary sanitary room that is visibly directly accessible to every user and is climatically sealed.

Since each user has a directly accessible, initially fully visible and securely locked individual sanitary room for use, gender separation can be convincingly dispensed with. This gender separation is always necessary when both areas assigned to women and men have to be divided by a common, closed anteroom situation or even two larger toilet facilities are to be provided, separated by gender. With a comparable total number of toilet cubicles, the directly accessible unisex solution according to the invention allows several small unisex groups in a decentralized manner, which then also have better use because a more even utilization is possible.

The aspect of increasing the capacity of sanitary facilities plays an important role in practice. At large events, such as those that take place in football stadiums, at theater or concert performances and the like, where many uses are required in a short time, the toilets are usually not suitable for the gender distribution of the visitors, especially when a large number of visitors use the toilets at the same time during breaks. Unisex rooms designed according to the invention have a significantly higher capacity due to the gender-neutral use option due to the even utilization option regardless of gender.

This also applies to airports, railway stations, schools, visitors to hospitals, shopping malls, hotels and the like, and of course also in inner-city areas for decentralized, smaller one- to two-room systems.

Even assuming the same number of toilet cubicles with a conventional arrangement, significantly less building volume is required due to the elimination of the areas separated by gender and the anterooms that may be omitted as a result, or a higher number of unisex rooms designed according to the invention with significantly increased capacity is possible with the same available building volume.

Also disclosed in general is the use of an angled door made of two wings arranged essentially at right angles to one another as a pivotable closure, in particular for public sanitary and/or toilet rooms, with one wing being made in particular of transparent material over the entire surface, preferably glass, and the other wing being made of opaque material. preferably stainless steel. The two wings arranged at right angles can be decoupled from their fixed positions, especially for emergencies.

Further details and advantages of the invention are explained using the following description of an exemplary embodiment with reference to the drawing.

Fig. 1

eine schematische Darstellung einer zwei Sanitärräume umfassenden Toilettenanlage nach der Erfindung, wobei beide Räume im freien, d.h. unbenutzten Zustand zu sehen sind,

Fig. 2

die Anlage nach Fig. 1, wobei im linken Sanitärraum die Winkeltüre im Übergang vom freien in den besetzten Zustand gezeigt ist, d.h. in dem Zustand, in dem eine Person den Raum betritt, und

Fig. 3

die Anlage nach Fig. 1, wobei der linke Sanitärraum im Besetztzustand und der rechte Sanitärraum im freien Zustand gezeigt sind.

In the drawing shows:

1

a schematic representation of a toilet facility comprising two sanitary rooms according to the invention, with both rooms being shown in the free, i.e. unused, state,

2

the plant after 1 , where in the left sanitary room the angled door is shown in the transition from the free to the occupied state, ie in the state in which a person enters the room, and

3

the plant after 1 , where the left sanitary room is shown in the occupied state and the right sanitary room in the free state.

The fundamental problem with conventional public toilets or toilet facilities is that, on the one hand, many users are not willing to clean the toilet as required after use and to leave the room in a hygienically perfect condition, and on the other hand, such facilities often Reason of partially closed in the unoccupied state or only partially open doors are confusing and a user must fear that a person is hiding behind a door in the room.

All of this means that the hygienic-aesthetic condition in these systems often leaves a lot to be desired, and when users visit such a system, a subliminal, uncomfortable feeling of insecurity can creep over them.

The sanitary facility according to the invention, as for example in 1 shown allows the user to see at a glance whether the booths are aesthetic are clean and clearly "free", which means that the current hygienic-aesthetic condition is no longer a secret and no subliminal uneasy feeling of insecurity can arise.

Each sanitary room 1 of the system, in which there is at least one toilet 2 with a toilet seat 7 and preferably a cleaning station 9 and associated equipment such as a paper holder and in particular a hand wash basin, is equipped with an angled pivoting door according to the invention.

Each of these angular doors consists of a transparent wing 3 and an opaque wing 4, the transparent wing 3 being associated with the free state of the cabin and the opaque wing 4 with the occupied state of the cabin. The transparent wing is preferably made of clear glass, the opaque wing 4 made of stainless steel or another opaque material.

On the mutually facing surfaces of the angled door, actuating elements 5, 6 are provided in the lower area of the respective door, by means of which each of the two wings 3, 4 is locked in the respective cabin 1-closing position and can be unlocked from this position.

As the 1 shows, the cabins are climatically closed off by the glass wing when not in use and one can immediately see whether the cabin or the sanitary room is in a hygienically perfect condition and is clean. Furthermore, it can be seen immediately that there are no hidden areas that could not give rise to any feelings of insecurity with regard to people who may be hiding.

2 shows the case that a person enters the left-hand cabin 1, ie the locking of the glass wing was via the actuating element 5 or the actuating element 6 is released via hip, thigh or foot contact and the angled door - taken along by the respective person - is pivoted, whereby the passage opening is released by the glass wing 3 and closed by the subsequent opaque wing 4 when the person is fully in the cabin. Unlocking via the actuating elements 5, 6 and opening can in turn be carried out without the aid of the hands. For this purpose, the actuating and locking elements are arranged in the lower area of the door, so that the upper element can be triggered with the thigh, for example, or the lower element can be triggered with the foot or the footrest of a wheelchair.

Alternatively, the opening process can also be triggered automatically by a motion sensor without operating elements. It is also possible to move the door in an automatic manner, but in any case it is ensured that mechanical emergency control systems are provided. In particular, it is possible to provide a releasable locking mechanism between the two wings, so that a single wing can be pivoted, particularly in an emergency.

3 shows the facility 1 with an "occupied" cabin shown on the left and on the right with a cabin that is also locked, but fully visible and thus also clearly verifiable with regard to the state of hygiene.

In the in the Figures 1 to 3 The exemplary embodiment illustrated provides that, after the toilet has been used, the flush is triggered via a sensor and the toilet bowl is cleaned with high pressure. The toilet seat 7 is automatically folded up into the cleaning position, with cleaning and drying in the cleaning station 9 being able to be triggered immediately and/or when the cabin is opened via the glass wing 3 .

To leave the cabin 1, the user must unlock the door lock via the operating elements 5, 6 provided on the metal wing 4, preferably again with the hip, the thigh or the foot. In this case, too, the door or one of the two wings can be used to trigger the flush if the user has forgotten to flush.

If the glass wing 3 is in the locked position again, further processes can be triggered in the fully visible cabin, which is always illuminated when it is dark. For example, an automatic high-pressure floor cleaning can take place, which a waiting visitor can also observe without being able to enter the cabin, since it is blocked for the cleaning time.

Another possibility to mention is the attachment of moveable handles 8, which make it easier for disabled users to use the toilet. These handles 8 are preferably attached to the ceiling and can be moved from a lateral rest position to the user position in the area of the toilet, whereby the control is again carried out via sensors and the return of the handles 8 to the waiting position can also be controlled via the glass leaf 3.

It should also be mentioned that the states "free" and "occupied" can be identified by corresponding colored signal elements or light-emitting elements in order to make orientation easier for users who are not yet familiar with the door system according to the invention, which changes from transparent to opaque and back.

Although the system according to the invention can be designed in particularly high expansion or quality levels depending on the application, it is important that all the essential advantages described above are also given with a simple mechanical solution.

For all design variants, when leaving the cabin, the respective user is aware that the transparent door immediately allows a view into the cabin and any waiting visitors can immediately see how the cabin is being left.

This social control inevitably means that the user will only leave the sanitary room after careful control, ie the user will be strongly motivated by this social control to keep the cubicle in a clean condition and to leave, so as not to be identified as a "dirty freak". to become.

In connection with the avoidance of hand contact already described above and the associated reduction in germ transmission, this aspect cannot be overestimated in its positive effect, which leads to improved hygiene in public sanitary facilities, for example at train stations, in shopping centers, in public places , in hotels, restaurants etc. and should even increase the acceptance of temporary toilets.

Reference character list

1

cabin

2

Toilet

3

glass wings

4

metal wings

5

control element

6

control element

7

WC seat

8th

handle

9

cleaning station

Claims (9)

1. A sanitary installation comprising at least one sanitary space which includes the respective sanitary units, which has a lockable pivot door and which can be closed by means of the pivot door,

   characterized in that

   the pivot door is configured as a double-leaf angled door (3, 4) having a leaf (3) composed of a material which is preferably transparent over its full area and having a leaf (4) composed of an opaque material,

   wherein the transparent leaf (3) closes the sanitary space (3) including the sanitary units (2) in the unused or free state

   and the opaque leaf (4) is transferred into the closed position corresponding to the occupied state by pivoting the transparent leaf (3) when the sanitary space (1) is entered.
2. A sanitary installation in accordance with claim 1, characterized in that operating elements (5, 6) for pivoting, locking and unlocking the angled door (3, 4) are only provided at the mutually facing inner surfaces of both leaves (3, 4).
3. A sanitary installation in accordance with claim 2, characterized in that the operating elements (5, 6) are configured as body-related operating strips, i.e. operating strips which can in particular be actuated by means of the hip, the thigh or the foot and which are preferably arranged in the region of the lower third of the leaves (3, 4).
4. A sanitary installation in accordance with one or more of the preceding claims, characterized in that
   the opaque leaf (4) consists of stainless steel and the transparent leaf (3) consists of clear glass.
5. A sanitary installation in accordance with one or more of the preceding claims, characterized in that
   the angled door (3, 4) is connected to an automatic drive in such a manner that it can be decoupled, said automatic drive being able to be triggered by actuation elements and/or sensors.
6. A sanitary installation in accordance with one or more of the preceding claims,
   characterized in that
   the two leaves of the angled door (3, 4) are designed such that they can be decoupled from one another in particular in the event of an emergency.
7. A sanitary installation in accordance with one or more of the preceding claims, characterized in that
   the transparent leaf (3) is used as a control and actuation element for at least one sensor which is associated with the position of the transparent leaf (3) in its locked state and which in particular controls cleaning, flushing and/or drying processes in the sanitary space (1).
8. A sanitary installation in accordance with claim 7,
   characterized in that
   a cleaning and drying station (9), in particular a visible cleaning and drying station (9), is provided for the toilet seat (7) of a toilet (2) provided in the sanitary space (1), said cleaning and drying station (9) receiving the toilet seat (7) in the raised position and, just like the pivot movement of the toilet seat (7), being controllable in dependence on the position of the transparent leaf (3).
9. A sanitary installation in accordance with any one of the preceding claims, characterized in that,
   for unisex use without an anteroom or with a common anteroom, each sanitary space (1) is designed as a climatically closed unit sanitary space which is visibly directly accessible to every user.

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