I got one of these off a Woot the other month. It performed as advertised on the vast amount of dry crap on one side of my house. It tossed all the (slightly damp) leaves and twigs out quite nicely. Yes, I still had to get up on the ladder once to put it up there, but I didn't have to climb down, move the ladder three feet, climb back up, rinse and repeat -- the looj probably saved me a good hour.
Unfortunately, the other side of the house was worse with the gutters containing standing water and a kind of vegetable soup. The looj didn't have any problem being submerged, but it was pretty much ineffectual. It simply showered me with foul-smelling water and pushed the mush ahead of it until it got stuck. I ended up doing that side by hand.
So if you use the looj a couple times a year and on non-flooded gutters, I think it's a good little tool. It keeps me off the roof, and that's easily worth a C-note to me.
As others have mentioned, the shuttle shitter is not a recycling unit, it is effectively a port-o-potty that stores the waste until the shuttle lands. The Russian model recycles the water, good for a system to be used on a long-term orbiting platform.
NASA had developed a recycling toilet back in the 1990's for use on the space station, but compared to the Russian model, it sucked... or didn't properly suck, depending on your point of view. The Russian design is far more efficient, costs less and has the notable advantage of being tested and refined over the course of 20 years of service on Mir and Salyut stations.
An editorial comment on NASA vs. the Russian space agency:
NASA is run by retired astronauts, RSA is run by military leaders appointed by the State. Astronauts tend to view everything as human-centric (on manned missions), while the Russian leaders tend to look at the mission first and the crew second. Thus NASA has a safety-first mindset and one that puts the comfort of the crew (within reason) before efficiency.
When NASA was developing the space toilet in the 80's, they came up with a design similar to the one the Russians had been using on their space stations for almost 20 years. It involved hoses and baggies. Presented to an astronaut advisory board (think "focus group"), the male astronaut reaction was almost universally "I ain't stickin' my boys in no hose!" and the design was scrapped in favor of a brutally inefficient design involving membranes, baffles and a gentle pressure differential.
Faced with similar reaction in the Russian (then Soviet) cosmonauts, one can only imagine that the answer was along the lines of "You will stick what we tell you to stick where we tell you to stick it, Comrade!"
Maybe I'm showing my increasingly distressing age, but did we not hear effectively the same thing when Windows XP came out? "Few users are planning to upgrade from Windows 98!" "My Windows 2000 works just fine!" "They can have my Windows 95 when they pry the drivers from my cold, dead peripherals!"
Don't get me wrong -- I have no plans to upgrade either.
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I got one of these off a Woot the other month. It performed as advertised on the vast amount of dry crap on one side of my house. It tossed all the (slightly damp) leaves and twigs out quite nicely. Yes, I still had to get up on the ladder once to put it up there, but I didn't have to climb down, move the ladder three feet, climb back up, rinse and repeat -- the looj probably saved me a good hour.
Unfortunately, the other side of the house was worse with the gutters containing standing water and a kind of vegetable soup. The looj didn't have any problem being submerged, but it was pretty much ineffectual. It simply showered me with foul-smelling water and pushed the mush ahead of it until it got stuck. I ended up doing that side by hand.
So if you use the looj a couple times a year and on non-flooded gutters, I think it's a good little tool. It keeps me off the roof, and that's easily worth a C-note to me.
As others have mentioned, the shuttle shitter is not a recycling unit, it is effectively a port-o-potty that stores the waste until the shuttle lands. The Russian model recycles the water, good for a system to be used on a long-term orbiting platform.
NASA had developed a recycling toilet back in the 1990's for use on the space station, but compared to the Russian model, it sucked... or didn't properly suck, depending on your point of view. The Russian design is far more efficient, costs less and has the notable advantage of being tested and refined over the course of 20 years of service on Mir and Salyut stations.
An editorial comment on NASA vs. the Russian space agency:
NASA is run by retired astronauts, RSA is run by military leaders appointed by the State. Astronauts tend to view everything as human-centric (on manned missions), while the Russian leaders tend to look at the mission first and the crew second. Thus NASA has a safety-first mindset and one that puts the comfort of the crew (within reason) before efficiency.
When NASA was developing the space toilet in the 80's, they came up with a design similar to the one the Russians had been using on their space stations for almost 20 years. It involved hoses and baggies. Presented to an astronaut advisory board (think "focus group"), the male astronaut reaction was almost universally "I ain't stickin' my boys in no hose!" and the design was scrapped in favor of a brutally inefficient design involving membranes, baffles and a gentle pressure differential.
Faced with similar reaction in the Russian (then Soviet) cosmonauts, one can only imagine that the answer was along the lines of "You will stick what we tell you to stick where we tell you to stick it, Comrade!"
Maybe I'm showing my increasingly distressing age, but did we not hear effectively the same thing when Windows XP came out? "Few users are planning to upgrade from Windows 98!" "My Windows 2000 works just fine!" "They can have my Windows 95 when they pry the drivers from my cold, dead peripherals!" Don't get me wrong -- I have no plans to upgrade either.