While our hotel room at the Grand Hyatt Kauai may not be our favorite room ever (that title still belongs to our suite at the Goldener Hirsch in Austria), it might be our favorite hotel stay.
We were blown away by the view (which was one of the best on the property, according to the front desk) when we entered the room.
While we were thrilled to have this view for the next three days, something else in the room drew our attention. The bathroom had a Toto Washlet. I’ll leave it as an IFKYK topic.
After our first trip to Japan in 2005, we became fascinated with these toilet/bidets (Note from Sharon – he always forgets that I went to Japan years before him, in 1995. I loved Totos back then, too). So much so that when we returned in 2009, we visited the Toto Super Space in Tokyo. Yep, that’s Sharon posing with a toilet.
At the time of that 2005 visit, Toto wasn’t a major brand in the US but when we renovated our master bathroom a few years later, it wasn’t hard to find one. It was more difficult to explain to the electrician why we needed an outlet by the toilet. This was when I learned about Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupters (GFCI).
In short, if you’re going to put electricity near water, code requires that if the circuit is interrupted (for example, if there’s a short caused by water), the circuit will turn off.
You’ve seen these outlets, even if you didn’t know what they were for.
There are two buttons. One tests the outlet, turning everything off when pressed. The other button resets the outlet, reactivating the circuit. We have one of these in our garage that controls the kitchen, bathrooms, and backyard outlets. If there’s a slight variance in the electric current at any outlet on the circuit, all of the outlets go dead and I need to reset the system in the garage.
Anyway, when we explored our room at the Grand Hyatt, Sharon was thrilled to see we had a Washlet, just like at home.
That was, until we couldn’t get the thing to work. The remote lit up but there was no action at the toilet. I went into repairman mode and checked the outlet by the toilet by plugging in a phone charger—no power at the outlet.
Time to find the GFCI outlet since it wasn’t the one by the toilet. It took a while, but I found one next to the sink in the other room, which was also not working. When I hit the reset button, the toilet magically sprang to life (which is a heck of a visual but go with me here).
We could have called the front desk and waited for maintenance to come to the room to fix the toilet. However, I knew the most likely cause of the toilet not getting power. It was just a matter of finding the outlet. Since we had no idea how long the Washlet was out of order, I ran a cleaning cycle before using it.
If you’re staying at a hotel and the outlets around the bathroom/kitchen aren’t working, try resetting the GFCI outlet. However, if the outlet keeps turning off, there’s a larger electrical problem somewhere, and that’s nothing you want to mess with. Call the front desk right away and possibly ask for a new room (with working outlets.)
For us, there were no further problems with the electricity during our stay and, if you’re wondering, I didn’t ask Hyatt for any sort of compensation.
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4 comments
You call that fixing something? I have done this dozens of times as hairdryers tent to set off the outlets. It’s almost equivalent to saying that you set the fridge to ‘on’
Sorry if you didn’t catch the sarcasm in the post. I felt it was info that some people might not know. And how are you tripping that many GFCI outlets with hairdryers??
I don’t mind bringing my supply of bio flow drain strips
Do they work quickly enough to be effective during your stay?