Anyone use JUST a composting toilet for their home?

Outside under a tarp to keep it dry is perfect. That's the way we keep ours for the horse stall.

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Trisha in WA
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What else does a man have to do in his short time here on earth than build soil and feed people~Forerunner

+1

Trying to learn is easier when folks are willing to share the "details".


This thread reminds me....I had a conversation at work today with a fellow...somehow got on to building plans for our place in Missouri. I mentioned I was thinking about composting our solid waste. This guy looked at me like I had fallen off the edge.

I didn't think I could shock someone who has known me 20 years...I guess I must be evolving!

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Jimmin "Any body with some handy tips on storage of sawdust . . .?? . .(a winters worth) . .??" In the humanure book (at least the version I read a long time ago) the writer stores his sawdust OUTSIDE so it is subjected to all weather. This starts the composting process. As to what you put in the toilet in the house, most any carbonaceous material would work in theory but I have asthma plus I'm sensitive to odor and allergic to spending money. At first I bought bales of pine shavings used as bedding for horses. I already was using them for my poultry. I got them at southern states. Smelled clean and piney. Then , as was mentioned on another thread related to food, SS started selling bales of shaving by "Pine Brothers" but it wasn't pine. Some other kind of shavings which were white but not as absorbent or clean smelling. I tried straw, peat (which I don't like to use because of depleting the bogs), hay, cardboard and shredded newspapers. There things were not precomposted, so I kept looking. The city of charlottesville, in the spring, sometimes gives whole truckloads of mulch, which is chipped up tree waste. I had a pile of that which had been setting for a year and was composting into black gunky stuff so I tried it and it worked fine. From there I went to the bags of leaves. There is a caution here. EMMA DO NOT READ TOXIC TMI! One evening in the dark I dumped my bucket and refilled with leaves from an open bag. I got home late from a huge meal at an allyoucaneat buffet and I knew I would want a freshly replenished receptacle in the morning. Sure enough, morning arrived and my system churned out a two-ton dump. I dropped a clean white paper plate over the stalagtite and retired to bed to drink my coffee. When I went to pour the coffee in the bucket, a SNAKE, looking very confused, was slithering across the plate. I don't know who was more horrified, me or the snake. I think I heard hims screaming, "ohmiGod, the Enola Gay is back! Run!!!" I dropped the bucket lid on hastily and went to faint on my bed when I had an afterflash of the image of the snake. It was a juvenile copperhead. Imagine a bulgy posterior poised naked and threating over a copperhead! Yikes yikes yikes. So if you set up a composting toilet and have leaves or other carbonaceous materials outside, only refill your bucket in daylight. Very carefully!

MORE TMI. I just remembered, I tried alfalfa pellets too, with poor success. Remember- I am composting large amounts of what normal people excrete into drinking water and float away PLUS banana peels, coffee grounds, charmin etc. Also, there is a magazine on the stands now. I do not think its backwoods home but its a homesteady magazine which has an article on earthworms which is very ho hum except, no kidding, the authoress taks (very briefly) about feeding her worms human dooky. NOT urine. She makes that point. Then, alas, she dropped the topic just when it got interesting. The reader is left to wonder.....

Any dried vegetable matter of fine enough consistency will accomplish the same end as sawdust. As for storing sawdust, I use 55 gallon drums. A tarp would suffice.
In all seriousness, were I lacking other options, I would build a small shed just for the purpose of storing dry carbon, such has become the value of that material on this farm.
My experience is that fresh, dryish sawdust works best to absorb the most liquid and eliminate the most odor. I do not prefer bone dry sawdust as a rule for the dust that is raised whenever it is handled. That said, my absolute most preferred sawdust type is that consistency and moisture level that comes off my chain saw when cutting hardwoods, green or cured. Such coarseness and moisture level is free of messy dust and absorbs odors very well. I do not find that slightly precomposted sawdust is advantageous in any way, lest one be in a bit of a hurry for the compost pile to mature.... which is NOT such a good idea in the first place when dealing with humanure.
When we dump the content of our bucket, it lands on top of a heating pile, and is covered immediately with wood chips and then weeds as the day's weeding residue comes available. Animals and insects are never a problem. Now red wrigglers, on the other hand..... well, those little devils will poke their noses into just anything.

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“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Barry Goldwater.
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Hi Emmy

You are sure taking a hit for the TMI comment. We use pallets to enclose ours. Dogs are kept out but who knows what the cats doo.

I hope Navotifarm was having a knee jerk reacton saying you were better than her.

Jim-mi we kept plastic wrap from a lumber order over our first sawdust pile.

I remember reading an article years ago about a compost toilet and earthworms....but I think they used two receptacles and put used TP in with the worms. Maybe our worm expert Shrek can give us details.

Yeah I suppose so, it's an issue I have to deal with soon.

The place I just bought has an old outhouse, nicely built cesspit under it too, as well as a septic system. I don't know if the outhouse is legal, or what I have to do to make it go away and fill in the pit legally.

Here, if it was in place before the law ('97, if I remember right), it's grandfathered and therefore legal. It's just new ones can't be put in without passing code.

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the Back Gate Country Quilt Shop

WOW . . . . . .Talk about TMI . . . .LOL

ROFLMAO . . . .The copper head thing . . . .LOL

thanks for the laugh of the week.

Okay. Here is TMI for some.

The Biolet NE has buckets to catch the .. well you know. The solids are not the problem.

The problem is the urine. I use a full 2 inches of the Biolet composting material (which isn't cheap) HOWEVER there is a construction/design flaw in the buckets.

The urine doesn't completly drain into the drain hole. There will be a good amount of urine sitting in the bottom. When the bucket is removed I find blackwater (urine which has run over whatever is in the bucket) which has collected in the bottom of the toilet. It cannot run over the lip which surrounds the drain hole.

The urine must be mopped up and that is nasty!


The bucket needs to be re-designed!

I think you are refering to the site of Australian based septic service A & A worm farm waste system company we discussed in 2004 but most U.S. septic codes were not receptive to at the time.

http://www.wormfarm.com.au/

Since then I have heard the concept is being better recieved.

While searching for the A&A site I found this site for a company based in

Sonoma County California so apparently U.S. code is becoming more receptive of arobic/anerobic hybrid septic systems.

http://www.septicgenie.com/earthworms.html

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They actually make these and they can purchased on line on the loveableloo website.
I looked at these before I purchased the Biolet NE.

tamille;
we had much the same problem with our sun-mar. The designs are probably slightly different but the liquid did not drain as it should and it was always a disgusting mess when you went to empty it! We finally went back to a normal toilet and have since moved but what I hoped was going to be a great idea turned out to be nothing but a continual problem. Honestly, sounds like most people using the bucket method had better luck them then me and the price would certainly be better!

We used the plans here to build ours, took us about an hour:
http://humanurehandbook.com/humanure_toilet.html

For several months in the winter, we used a toilet lid placed on a 5 gallon pail as a makeshift toilet, since the pipes froze on me. I used big bags of shredded pine as the "mulch", and it works pretty decent, no smell as long as you cover the fresh droppings.
Our building code doesn't mention composting toilets, just regular ones.

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We have used a bucket for about a year. There are numerous sawmills in the area, so we have used sawdust most of the time. We've used fresh sawdust and very aged, almost composted sawdust. We also tried using topsoil. The topsoil here is so thin and rocky that it wasn't very absorbent, meaning that the pail filled way too fast. The composted sawdust works fairly well, and breaks down quickly in the compost pile. But my favorite by far has been fresh sawdust. It's a sponge for odors. Flies fly from it.
As a side note, I've used it as bedding in my milking barn, and it is marvelous for fly control. I always covered fresh deposits with more sawdust, and found that I had no need for fly spray.
We also sanitize our pails in the sunshine between uses.
After reading "Farmers of Forty Centuries" and part of "The Humanure Handbook", I find myself glad to see the pails filling quickly. (We are a household of 7 people.) And all the way to the bathroom, a mantra keeps running through my head - "Nutrients, nutrients, nutrients..."

Did you know there is a Facebook page for Humanure?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Humanure/180566911643


There is a video of Sir Joseph Jenkins teaching Haitians how to compost Humanure after the earthquake.

Has anyone ever found hundreds of maggots - not from house flies - in there buckets?

Quite a surprise to plant my butt on them in the dark,and be held hostage until I could get to a good stopping point and get my bug covered arse out of dodge. Then off to the shower (for a rinse off) - for us a impromptu hose from the water storage tank since it was 6 am in August and no shower bags ready yet.

They only seem to get into our bucket with a "Hunters Loo" lid which does not seal well. It is also not frequently used so it sits longer between dumplings. We will start putting extra sawdust in this bucket.

Now there was an entertaining example of TMI

Nothing out of the ordinary in finding maggots in a bucket that should have been dumped and left clean during a period of non-use.
More sawdust will help, but no food sitting around attracts no maggot breeders.

Oh, and Rick.... thanks for the good video heads-up.

__________________
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Barry Goldwater.
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