Ball pits should have the balls cycled and cleaned hourly, they're disgusting
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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I remember on reddit I said something to the effect of "if I were a parent I would not let my kids go in the ballpit. It's covered in urine, and hasn't been cleaned in decades."
Some idiot said that they do put the balls in a washing machine every night.
No they don't! They would need dozens and dozens of industrial sized washing machines to clean all the balls in one night.
And also, how do they dry? Can't just put them in a drier. They'll melt.
Hand drying would take a whole crew months.
Thats really satisfying I'd happily let my child in the ball pit then just wander off and find this machine and gorm out watching it.
violet?
wrong pit
Except the touchscreen UI.
It would be very expensive and such impractical but I could see some sort of automated cleaning. Like you close for the day and before walking out you hit some button, warm/hot water is spayed from ceiling and posts come up from below and spin causing agitation of the balls. This lasts for say 30 minutes(would need testing). From then on water stops but posts keep moving and hot air is blown for say 6 hours. That should be sufficient to kill/wash away most bacteria, similar to your dishwasher but longer time due to amount of balls and lower temp to protect the balls.
There's some safety concerns(don't want to start wash cycle will kid still in) so maybe enter a code vs just a button. You can accidently hit a button. If you accidentally hit 97531 I have questions about your mental health. If you don't notice a kid is still in there at end of night, you were about to lock them in for the night anyways so you likely have procedures to confirm that anyways.
I think instead I'd design it to clean a single ball at a time, continuously. Smaller footprint and less infrastructure involved. Dunno how many hours it'd take to turn around a lot of the ball pit but anything is better than nothing?
Well, at least we know we can still go on Lemmy for human interaction - appreciate the effort put into the drawing.
Glad you appreciate! It is neither good nor high effort, but it's a real drawing made with a real pencil
As a kid I went to a large indoor ball pit once where they had something like that, but they had the outputs hooked up to marble runs and ball cannons. It would also filter out any broken balls. I don't know how long it took to cycle through all the balls, because this place was absolutely massive. Probably millions of balls.
Also need to clean the pit itself or any new clean balls will just be chucked right into the piss and drinks puddle at the bottom
I figured it was a cleanable bucket conveyor, so it's getting continuously cleaned. That's how you do it with some processes, like conveyors for bottling liquids
Interesting and if purely gravity fed would be safe during working hours and could scale horizontally. The only problem I see is confirming all balls were cleaned and not like the same 20 balls cleaned 20 times a day...
Wait just had a great/horrible idea... Wave pool of balls in a ball pit. Suck balls on one side, shoot balls out other side. The balls are constantly washed and returned but creates a wave/swimming like sensation
Hence the input and output being on the opposite sides? But yeah it definitely wouldn't be perfect. But it doesn't need to be perfect?
Ooooo wave ball pool sounds sick
Take your design, make 100 of them , input on right, output on left, make users sign waivers cause it might be dangerous...
Just make them UV resistant and hit them with a strong UV light. It might not get rid of dirt or gum or stuff, but it will at least kill anything living on it.
That would work too but still need to move the balls around so you don't only get the top layer.