If a male lives in your home, cleaning the bathroom can easily be the worst job around.

	The Lloyd residential urinal. Click photo for larger image.

Even if he remembers to put the seat down, a boy's aim -- and that includes big boys like Dad -- isn't always on target. And really, what's worse than wiping up a mess on the toilet seat or floor?

There is a solution, if you're willing to look beyond the bowl. A growing number of urinals are finding a home in residential bathrooms.

Because they lack a seat and are mounted on the wall, they make an easier target and are simpler to keep clean than traditional toilets. Well, theoretically, anyway; they still must be wiped down on occasion.

But there's another less obvious benefit to the residential urinal: It can reduce water usage and save money. Toto's one-piece Lloyd residential urinal ($975-$1,220), for instance, uses less than 1 gallon, almost half the water per flush of even a low-flow toilet. And it doesn't even stick out much, because it's been designed to integrate with a toilet, bidet, lavatories, tub and air bath.

Waterless models, such as Waterless Co.'s No-Flush urinal, are even more sustainable. Instead of flushing waste down the drain, these tankless units use an odorless blue liquid that floats on top of other liquids, much like oil floats on water, to create a vapor barrier in a trap. Urine passes through the "BlueSeal" liquid and down the drain. The manufacturer claims that just 3 ounces of the liquid seal will last for an equivalent of 1,500 "flushes," and the fixture itself -- which costs $400 -- can save up to 45,000 gallons of water per year.

ZeroFlush waterless urinals offer the same basic technology at roughly the same price.

Dan Kendra, a LEED-accredited engineer with Tower Engineering, is a convert. A believer in green building, he installed a No-Flush urinal in a downstairs bathroom in his Beaver Falls home last year. His 7-year-old son uses it, and another boy, still in diapers, will soon learn, he says. Mr. Kendra and his wife, Laura Chevalier, are so pleased that they're planning to install a second urinal this year in the main bath.

"It doesn't smell, and it's also not messy," he says, adding that cleanup involves spraying it down once a week with window cleaner and wiping it out with paper towels.

But it might be a hard sell for the rest of us. While most guys would find it incredibly cool to have a urinal within spitting distance of their basement rec room, the idea doesn't transcend the sexes.

"Most of my female clients say, "Eww, we don't want it,' " says Brenda Corbett, manager of Elite Plumbing Kitchens & Bath in Canonsburg.

The store has a $975 Toto Lloyd urinal on display in the showroom.

"Men have a hard enough time getting it into the commode, let alone a urinal," she says.