Composting Toilets

[Mike Wallace]

Anyone have any first hand experience with composting toilets in cabins or hunting shacks? I'm looking for a way to have indoor plumbing without plumbing indoors.

I have done some research online and know there are several vendors for these products, but I thought I would check here for information.

Anyone?

[BoxMN]

One thing to check out is the opperating temp requirement. Might make it tough to use in spring and fall for some of them.

I do not have one, but wanted one. Wifey wants full plumbing though, so right now it is still just outhouse until we decide whether to build or update a bit... or place is too small to really add a bathroom.

[Drillgun Deva]

A couple years ago I had the experience of living "rustic". My daughters and I lived in a house with no plumbing way out in the boonies. We built our own composting toilet - very simple and effective albeit a bit more labor intensive than a flush toilet. It was basically a box, about 2' deep, 2' in height and 4' in length with a hinged lid that had two holes cut in the top. Toilet seats were mounted over the holes and two five gallon buckets went directly under each hole. One bucket is filled with sawdust, which must be living organic material - not sawdust made from kiln dried wood. You can use any living organic material - pine needles etc. This is used to cover your [PoorWordUsage] (which goes in the other bucket). The living organic material breaks down the waste. We had this in the bathroom of our house (not outhouse)and suprisingly, had no problem with smell. Once we covered the [PoorWordUsage], the smell got covered as well. When the bucket is full you find an appropriate place, dig a hole, bury the [PoorWordUsage] and cover it completely with more living organic material. You can read about this type of toilet, including directions on how to make it, by going to this link:

http://www.green-trust.org/wiki/index.php?title=Composting_Toilet

and there's also a book called The Humanure Handbook that details homemade composting toilets - how to make and proper treatment of the waste. The key is that it must be put somewhere where it will have time to break down, and of course, somewhere that dogs (or other animals) won't be able to get at it.

We had friends that had spent a $thousand+ on a Sun Mar composting toilet and put it in an outhouse. It was almost as bad as using a portapoddy, smellwise, but less labor intensive as you didn't have to empty it after 5 gallons.

Hope this is useful.

[blongtin]

Up at our cabin at the Lake of the Woods we've always had an old outhouse to go in, however this year my father built a small shed/outhouse that we put a composting toilet in. He made the shed pretty nice with tung and groove on the interior. Anyways the composting toilet has worked out pretty good. When we get up there for the weekend we just flip the switch which turns on the heater/fan and pretty much forget about it except for adding a little peat moss to it daily. There was no smell from it at all. We have a built in electric heater in the shed for the winter to keep it at about 50 degrees so nothing freezes up.

This winter I went up there with about a dozen guys for a fishing trip...drinking and eating chili can give you a good idea of what it was like. It handled all of us for about four days and didn't start to smell or wasn't a problem. I guess once you figure out how to use it it's pretty simple and it's been a good investment.