I got a fancy bidet toilet seat. It works fairly well and having water for washing is great. But I don’t love some details, see notes below. Mostly I wanted to share how much power the thing uses.

About 80 Watt-hours a day, or an average of 3 watts. Note this is without the seat heater. About ¼ of the power was from using the bidet actively once a day; the rest was just having it plugged in unused.

That’s very little power, like one hour of an old fashioned lightbulb per day. Or about 3 cents a day. Most bidet functions take just a few watts when operating: the pump, the fans. It uses less than a watt on standby. The big power consumption is anything with heat: the water heater, the blow dryer. Those use 200W when active but that’s not very often, the water tank seems well insulated. In theory the device can draw up to 500W but the most I saw was 250W. But then I never used the seat heater.

I don’t like the compromises involved in having the bidet be built into the seat. It’s great for retrofitting an existing toilet but it makes it bulky and the seat is uncomfortable. Having the water supply and bidet sprayer integrated into the toilet bowl must work better. I wish I at least had an elongated toilet; the washlet blocks a fair amount of the bowl.

Toto washlets come in a dizzying array of options; see here for a breakdown. Honestly all I want is warm water and an oscillating spray, the other features don’t seem so important to me. (For awhile I use one of those cheap $30 cold water doodads; it worked pretty well.) I think an instant heater is probably worth the upgrade price though; the C5 tank runs out fast and while it’s well insulated, heating on demand would be better.