Composting toilet designs for skittish wives and city slickers?

If your wife doesn't want to go this way, why don't you put in septic. Keeping the wifey happy is mighty important.

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-----DD

So True!!

The trick is to use lots of wood pellets for the bottom and take out once you see around 3/4 full. Again, urine is your enemy, and it gets heavy and can spill out if you've waited too long and didn't use enough wood pellets in the bottom. The first week was the learning curve and we haven't had any problems after that. You can tell your wife that you will do carrying duty, it really is the biggest amount of problems with buckets. Putting a system where you can get them from the outside is a great idea, we just walk ours through but it isn't that far.

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Idleness is leisure gone to seed

You can always install a vermicomposter unit in an existing septic system like the wormorator or septicgenie systems to have both the convienence of traditional plumbing and the composting efficiency of earthworms.

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Don't want to hijack this thread, but the questions I have are related and seeing as there's lots of experienced people with this in here I thought I'd ask. cb: Let me know if you want me to delete this.



We're moving in the not to distant future to some land (so we're just some city slickers with no experience at any of this as of yet) and my wife and I are planning to try the bucket method.

So here are a couple of silly questions that have gone through my mind (which may show my inexperience at the homesteading lifestyle haha)

1) How much sawdust does it take to use the bucket method and have no smell? ie - how long would a 5 gal bucket of sawdust last 2 people?

I can imagine I'll have SOME projects that will create sawdust, but not a ton all the time (land is in West TX with half of it being pasture... so won't have the tree duty some from a wooded area will have). I was just invisioning having to find stuff to cut etc. for the sole purpose of creating sawdust.... I will likely have some Mesquite trees to remove, but the "chipper/shredders" I was looking at don't look like they make "sawdust" sized output...looks too big for this use.... though I"ll be happy to be corrected if that's the case.

I read about someone who went to a sawmill and was allowed to collect what they needed for free, but again, being in West TX (not to mention 35 miles from town) I'm not sure if that would be an option even available...

2) Absent of a sawmill, where would be a good source of non-chemical laden wood? (figuring if I'm going to put it in the compost pile, which down the road will be used on the garden, I don't want whatever is in pressure treated wood etc. Maybe a cabinet shop?

Along those lines (chemical), I have in the back of my mind wanted to get some woodworking tools and noticed a buddy's planer made a huge amount of sawdust. But with all that we'll be needing for the move and change of lifestyle I don't think my "woodshop" will come until far down the line... but when it does... is there anything wrong with untreated dimensional lumber that would be cause for alarm? I'm thinking ply and OSB have glues... but regular 2x lumber should be fine for that use correct?


Finally:

3) How long can the bucket stay before being taken out (if that's an issue)? I noticed above with a family of 5 it was every other day, but with me and my wife only, and mostly adding in many days where that issue is timed so that it's happens to "happen" at work, it might take a good two weeks to get a 5gal bucket 3/4 full...

Thanks in advance. Again, if it's too much of a drift from the original post, mods please delete and I'll make my own thread.


Rob

1/2. We buy our sawdust. This is the prairie. We don't have sawmills and there's no way we'd generate enough for ourselves.
We get "wood shavings" (not "chips") that they sell for barn bedding at the local Ace. Supposedly you're not supposed to use kiln-dried, but that's what it is and we've never had any trouble with it doing its thing.
It's a big 2.5 cubic foot (compressed) bag for $6. We go through about one a month.

You probably won't want to use mesquite shavings for the same reason we don't want to use cedar; it doesn't break down very easily.

3. Our family of four goes through a bucket every day and a half or so.
We have six buckets in our rotation so emptying can be a once-a-week chore.

Download the online book (or shell out the money for the bound one at Amazon for bathroom reading. lol) It has a lot of really good information in it. Including what to do with your compost pile!

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I used sawdust from the mill or bought sawdust but I mixed it with peat/spaghum maybe some vermiculite. I kept mind that this was going to be compost for the garden 1-2 yrs down the road. All my kitchen scraps, minus bones, went in the bucket also. This can speed up composting. You take the bucket out when ever you want , you do not have to wait until it is full, just whatever the weight is you want to cover. If you put in a lot of kitchen waste it might be more frequent. I always tried to have leaves, grass trimmings, weeds, etc to cover the fresh addition to the compost pile.
I love what it adds to the soil. The earthworms really enjoy the piles too.

The book is a really good resource to have.

I don't see a reason why it would start smelling. I honestly have never had smelling, as long as you cover well. We do have sawmills, being in Oregon, but sawdust is a minimal cost, so we take a trailer and pick up one yard at a time for (I think) $12 per yard. A yard lasts us a long time but we do sometimes use it for different animals around the place so I'm not sure I can accurately say how long a yard would last two people but a long time.

I have a question for you Erin: Do you cover the buckets and set them outside and then deal with them once a week? We were just talking about this last night and we thought we should go to this method. I always worried that covered and sitting they would start smelling, do you have a problem with that? I would probably have 8 buckets to do once a week.

One more side note, we also have a litter box and it is way more disgusting (by a long shot!) so if you can deal with a litter box, you can easily deal with bucket toilets.

I guess I forgot a couple of things. We get our sawdust at a landscaping type place, they sell rocks, soil, chips, bark mulch, those types of things, I can't imagine any place like this not carrying sawdust, just call around. And I just re-read Robbo's questions and again, urine is the biggest problem so even if you make "deposits" elsewhere, the urine starts really building up and getting heavy.

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When I used the sawdust toilet system exclusively, I used 6 gallon buckets as that is the height of a "handicapped" toilet, and I liked the fact the "stuff" was farther down in the bucket. I emptied it when it got half full as that was all I could manage, which was about twice a week on average. If you can manage one 3/4 full, then twice a week for two people would be about right.

I live near a sawmill, so have no problem getting mesquite and cedar sawdust for free. I try to avoid cedar but sometimes there is some mixed in. You don't say where in W. Texas you live, but if cotton growing country, I understand cotton burrs work fine also. I've been meaning to stop by the gin in Ballinger to get some to try. As to the amount used -- as much as it takes to cover the "deposit" and avoid odor. In a mixed household, I'd set up a urinal bucket for the men. Just fill a bucket 3/4th full with sawdust. No need to add any extra. That way the other bucket would last two people a week or more.

Do read the humanure handbook and peruse Jenkin's site. http://humanurehandbook.com/
Lots of good information there, including a link to read the 2nd edition on-line free of charge.

Yeah, we just put the lid on when one is full and set it out the back door.
We'd started with only three buckets, thinking we'd be happier emptying them more often, but it was a 20 min. chore, twice a week. With six, it's a 20 minute chore once a week. And no, they don't seem to really smell anymore at the end of a week than they did at the end of 3-4 days.
However, the week of Easter I'd been in the hospital for about four days and we'd gone nearly 2 weeks before getting to emptying the first buckets... Those were a little more pungent. But still not bad.

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~*~Erin~*~
SAHM, ranch wife, sub and quilt shop proprietress
the Back Gate Country Quilt Shop

outhouses are popular around here, as are composting setups [a bucket inside a throne-cabinet, which is hauled outside once a week to a compost pile].

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Don't use the corrugated pipe since the "stuff" going down it will get caught up (at least parts of it) in the grooves on the pipe and smell bad and also be hard to rinse out. Use a smooth walled pipe instead.

We have 3 Out Houses and all work great. Since we do have indoor plumbing, and the Out Door are for people hiking on the trails, we use when outside or working outside and we use them when power is out or we have large groups visiting.......they work great and never smell bad. We just dug a deep hole and built over it. We clean the toilet seats and we sweep them out but so far we have not had to do anything to the hole part.

When in use, of course, when we look down in the hole one can see "stuff" and toilet paper but after a week or so it just rots. Ours do not even look like the size of the hole is reduced yet.

Friends we know have traditional Out Houses - wood "House" and wood platform for the regular toilet seat, but they used a barrel and the "stuff" goes down under and into the bucket underneath. They can open it up from behind the house, clean out the bucket and compost the "stuff". They have a larger bucket .......I think it is half of a 50 gallon size barrel.

Good luck

Thanks for the info! I'm going to try it, worst case we go back to emptying every other day. You are right, it is a 20 min chore, and 20 min once a week sounds much better!

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Uh, I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that is a big no-no to compost human waste and put it in your vegetable garden. Even cat doody can give you toxoplasmosis which can kill human fetuses. You'd better do some research on that first. I'm thinking you could put it on flower beds though.

You would be shocked by the Humanure Handbook. The author has been using composted human "waste" on his vegetable garden for many years with no problems. The key is thorough hot composting, which should kill just about any pathogens.

Interesting topic. My wife and I plan to build someday and I was thinking it would be a big help financially to avoid an inground septic system. From what I've read and heard, you're talking at least 10 grand and a friend of mine was quoted a cost of 30 grand...and that was just to upgrade an existing system!
I'd much rather shell out a couple grand for a Sunmar. By the way, there are plenty of 'oldtimers' around here who pull buckets of waste from the outhouse for their tomato plants. Don't know that I'd go that far, but I think the compost from a toilet would be great for fruit trees.

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I've heard very little good about commercially manufactured composting toilets, and lots of horror stories.

Well then I'm glad I'm researching the idea before going ahead with it. That's still a lot of money to shell out for something that doesn't work.

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Heh...no matter how much I know that proper hot composting will kill nasty stuff, I still wouldn't be able to use the resulting compost in a food garden. I'd keep worrying if it composted just hot enough, and it's also seems kinda creepy to me.

My mamau used sawdust and a five-gallon bucket until she was in sixties, when she ended up moving to a house with indoor plumbing. She dumped the bucket waste around the fruit trees in the winter and spring, and used the outhouse in the summer and fall. I think that's what I'd end up doing too.

As long as the compost gets hot enough and then rests for at least a year before use, it is perfectly fine to use on veggie gardens. I've been doing it for 12+ years with no ill effects. The Humanure Handbook has a graph at the back that lists the pathogens and what it takes to kill them. Either heat or time will do the trick. Use both and you are assured of a complete kill off.

Robbo… Right! Where to get all that sawdust? I started hating the idle of flushing clean water to bury poop 6 foot under my front yard to eventually leach into the river but I didn’t want to try to sweep chain-sawdust off the ground or buy hamster bedding. I needed something I could produce myself…

HAY.
Dry hay works very well for smell and keeping everything “clumpy”. I haven’t been using it long enough to say how good it is for decomposition but its hay… it’s browns… it must compost the green poop good. I never heard anyone talk of using hay, did I come up with an ideal or has hay already been dismissed for some reason?

Hay is certainly not as nice to use as sawdust and I wouldn’t want a bale in the house but the way I see it… the key is to use LOTS of “something” on the pee&poo to keep down the odor and yuck factor. If you don’t have LOTS of “something” you start conserving and then you get yuck.

Right now after pooping I cover with hay and jam it down in the bucket with a big stick. It don’t smell, absorbs pee well and when dumping it comes out like a big hay jello mold. Hehe. I’m sure hay would work better if it were chopped up, more like saw dust. Then no jamming into the bucket… But that requires a separate process and I haven’t figured out that process.
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CBcansurvive… I think you got to keep spinning it... convince her to compost. If saving money, water and the environment isn’t a concern for her… get her into rose gardening and convince her humanure would grow the best roses.