1st use of composting toilet. Not sure I'll keep it.

S

serpa4

New member
My 2018 venture came with a composting toilet. The PO took out the factory flush one with holding tank and macerator discharge.
They have been happy with the composing one, so I'd give it a try.
I had about 3 inches of nice dry coconut bark or whatever that stuff is in the bottom of the bucket.
Open the lid, poop drops into the bucket. Sometimes I sprinkled a little of the coconut stuff over it. Pee goes overboard.
At the end of the trip, I had a pile of poop and toilet paper sitting on top of a nice clean pile of coconut.
Don't get it. I could have just pooped in a bucket all the same.
Do you have to get a stick and stir my poop?
 
Retired compost scientist here, known to many students as Dr. Poop.

Yes, you need to mix it. The coconut bark is a “bulking agent”. The purpose is to help aerate (add oxygen to) a mixture of poop, bark, and water. No mix, no mixture. Your gut is anaerobic, so your poop is too (initially), and produces many smells you don’t want. If oxygen (about 1/5 of the air we breathe) isn’t able to diffuse into and take the poop from an anaerobic to an aerobic state, the anaerobic (no oxygen) breakdown will continue, along with associated smelly gases.

That said, most composting toilets have a system for mixing. Mine has a detachable handle and a bar that swings and mixes from the bottom. You can certainly stir with a stick, but then you have a nasty stick. You should mix regularly, and maybe add more ground bark, as the breakdown will tend to reduce the continuous pores that allow oxygen into the mixture. I’ve worked on systems from toilets to whole-city sewage and yard waste, and mostly failures are due to poor aeration, letting the mixture lose its porosity, and then go anaerobic.

For a small system like a toilet, you’re looking to have an earthy odor like freshly-turned earth (aerobic), not like rotten eggs (anaerobic decomposition).
 
robhwa":3rbmhyo1 said:
Retired compost scientist here, known to many students as Dr. Poop.
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Dear Dr. Poop,
Do you have a recommendation for a simple composting toilet that's suitable for a 22 Cruiser? I want to avoid "nasty stick".
Thank you.
 
One more thing…you’ll never finish a trip with finished compost ready for your garden. Composting takes time. I’ve worked with multimillion $ systems that companies said could produce finished, stabilized compost quickly. They all failed. In the case of a composting toilet, you’ll need some time for the mix to “finish” and stabilize, or breakdown the readily-active components of your digestion into stable organics compounds, similar to humus in soil. These things do work, but they are best for people with a little patience.

It is certainly quicker to pump out and be down with it.

For the composter, after a trip, let it sit for a few weeks or a month before you remove the material. Actually, there is usually no need to remove only a few person/days of material. It can sit in the composter until the next trip as long as it doesn’t dry out.

Usually, the instructions that come with the toilets are a bit optimistic as to how fast these things work.
 
serpa4":9vzr22yt said:
At the end of the trip, I had a pile of poop and toilet paper sitting on top of a nice clean pile of coconut.
Don't get it. I could have just pooped in a bucket all the same.
Do you have to get a stick and stir my poop?
Click to expand...

That might the first time that question has ever been asked on this site. Dang near spit out my coffee! Since appears you do have to stir it, and that is gross, if it were mine it would be on FB Marketplace really soon.
 
pcg":3bhfqu48 said:
robhwa":3bhfqu48 said:
Retired compost scientist here, known to many students as Dr. Poop.
Click to expand...
Dear Dr. Poop,
Do you have a recommendation for a simple composting toilet that's suitable for a 22 Cruiser? I want to avoid "nasty stick".
Thank you.
Click to expand...

I like the “C-Head”. Separating urine from the poop is a great feature. Usually, the main problem with smells is the rapid breakdown of urea/uric acid in urine to ammonia. I like the C-Head for longer trips by myself in the C-Dory 22 and my camper. However, I’ve never really found a permanent place for it.

Like me, you may find a C-Head hard to place on a 22. I usually use a Home Depot bucket with a toilet seat, and mix in the bark and a material to absorb urine (I use “Smelleze”), since it is hard for females to separate things. You can just shake the bucket or use a stick. It works.
 
Initially when I got my 25, I pulled the MSD out, because finding pumpouts was a PITA! And the MSD was an integral unit with a 9g tank. Basically an oversized porta potti. So I pulled it out and replaced it with a standard porta Potti. Much simpler, and could be dumped anywhere I found an outhouse or toilet. Several years later, I'm tired of dumping the blue mess, and finding it harder and harder to find an outhouse or toilet along my cruising routes. So I finally bought into the composting toilet crowd, buying a new Airhead. Our trip this month was our maiden voyage with it. Some learning curve, but so far I'm pretty happy with it. Easily got three weeks use with two of us full time on board. The liquids container did need to be emptied daily, but easy enough. (You never know how much you pee, until you have to empty a two gallon container more frequently than you first imagined!) I originally used Peat Moss, as I had a big full bag at home. I've been conversing with Airhead, and they suggested using Coconut Choir as a better choice. I'm currently using that, but didn't quite fill the solids bucket to the recommended level, and it didn't seem to mask the smell as well, so I added a little bit of the extra peat moss I had along. So far so good. I/we do stay on our boat for up to a month at at time. It's nice not having to look for a pump out, and to have something that lasts almost that entire month with both of us on board. BTW, I've also learned that the composting toilets we have really aren't composting, but rather just "drying".

I'm curious what composting toilet you have, if it does not have a mixing aparatus of some kind? I know there are several toilets out there, but seems like the ones most talked of are the C-Hear, Airhead, and Natures Head. Colby
 
We owned an "Air Head". we only dumped the "solid" waste after several trips. The compost was turned over with the SS bars which were in the toilet, and you just turned the crank. We had a 12 volt fan which ran 24/7. Some folks get two urine containers, for the male, we usually had a separate "stand up" container.

Between trips I would "crank the handle" once a week to stir up the composting material. After we took the material out of the boat, we left it black plastic trash bags--turned these weekly-and about a year after being taken off the boat, there is nothing resembling "poop" left--ready for the garden.

By the way, no TP in the composting head. TP Goes into Walmart plastic bags, and then to the trash container. Once you get it working will, you be converted.

(By the way Colby, it is coconut coir (outside fibrous husks of coconut) I bought bricks of it from Amazon. One has to add some water to make it like damp earth. I used my buck 110 to shave off pieces of the coir. I also used some various probiotics such as Rid-X or some compost starter--what I used was quite reminiscent of horse pucky.
 
T.R. Bauer":2gro5arb said:
That might the first time that question has ever been asked on this site. Dang near spit out my coffee! Since appears you do have to stir it, and that is gross, if it were mine it would be on FB Marketplace really soon.
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You guys in the valley are always stirring shit!
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :thup
 
I think C-Head may be out of business. I can't find any dealers who offer it for sale and their website is gone. Posts on other forums indicate that there has been no response from C-Head over the past year, including a post from one fellow who ordered and paid for a C-Head a year ago and never got the product or any response from his attempts to contact the company.
 
pcg":2lyw5x36 said:
I think C-Head may be out of business. I can't find any dealers who offer it for sale and their website is gone. Posts on other forums indicate that there has been no response from C-Head over the past year, including a post from one fellow who ordered and paid for a C-Head a year ago and never got the product or any response from his attempts to contact the company.
Click to expand...

Yes, yes. C-Head appears to be out of business since last summer.

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/c-head.com

Sounds like there are two options now. It’s a shame as the C-Head were a bit smaller, cheaper, still well-made, and would fit better into a 22.
 
That might the first time that question has ever been asked on this site. Dang near spit out my coffee! Since appears you do have to stir it, and that is gross, if it were mine it would be on FB Marketplace really soon.
Click to expand...

We use a port potty on our 22 and we each have our pee bottles and Judy has a 'wizzer' as she calls it. Essentially a devise that allow a women to pee standing up. So very little urine goes into the toilet. So far on cruises up to two weeks we have no problem. No toilet paper goes into port potty either, we burn that at low tide on the beach.

Now getting somewhat off topic, for the first 9 years we lived on the ranch, we lived in an old farm house with no plumbing, so we had a path and a pail. Now if you live without plumbing in the 'Great White North' you might understand the term 'tipping the pyramid' in the middle of winter. I now enjoy the comforts of indoor plumbing and I am glad that I no longer have to get fully dressed at 40 below to go out and do my business. What I do miss is seeing the northern lights, listening to the birds or the crunch of the snow walking too and from the 'White House' as we called it. So dealing with a port potty is no big deal for us.
 
Patty here. We had an Airhead put in Daydream as she was being built, 2005. We have loved it. We spent 8 months on the Great Loop, used it every day, and only had to dispose of solids 4 times. The convenience of not needing to pump out-priceless.
 
We deleted the standard marine head in 2005 prior to Daydream's build for a credit and installed an Airhead ourselves. We are so glad we did!

As Dr. Bob said, commercially available composting toilets have, or should have, a handle on the outside that rotates the bars inside to mix the poop and the medium after each use. We used cocoanut coir for the medium. It is important to slightly dampen the medium at the start, but never to let it get very wet - that is why they have separate solids and liquid receptacles!

We chose not to put TP in the solids container but you can, it is just slower to decompose. The exhaust fan is an ordinary 12 volt computer fan that runs all the time. I carried a spare fan since it is essential to have air flow but I did not need to replace it. The fan vents to the outside and the Airhead is basically odor-free in operation.

As Patty said, we bagged the solids up only four times over 8 months on the Loop and disposed of it in dumpsters. The liquid tank got carried up to a toilet at marinas or dumped overboard in deep water.

We really cannot think of a single reason NOT to have a composting toilet.
 
What brand of composing toilet do you have? I do not know of any that do not have a way of turning the solids. I have an airhead but have also used a natures way and a c-head. They all work well and I’d never go back to using a holding tank toilet again. We’ve had our airhead for over 6 years now and have had no issues with it. There can be a learning curve with the main problem being too much moisture in the material where the solids collect.

I have not heard of anyone removing a Airhead……yet.
 
I wonder, does a composting toilet count as a permanent toilet for Ontario, Canada? Apparently a porta-potti does not.

However, since you don't need a pump out or plumbing for a composting toilet, is it a permanent installation?

This is not a question about the toilet itself (you can argue it either way), but how the Ontario legal system identifies it.
 
ssobol":3emdn6jn said:
I wonder, does a composting toilet count as a permanent toilet for Ontario, Canada? Apparently a porta-potti does not.

However, since you don't need a pump out or plumbing for a composting toilet, is it a permanent installation?

This is not a question about the toilet itself (you can argue it either way), but how the Ontario legal system identifies it.
Click to expand...

From what I have researched (this trip is in my plans, too), they will be looking for a deck fitting for pumping out. Since composting toilets don’t have them, then the answer from the refs is “no”, composting toilets are not legal in Ontario.

Has anyone encountered a different result?

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/900343
 
robhwa":24q4nu4o said:
ssobol":24q4nu4o said:
I wonder, does a composting toilet count as a permanent toilet for Ontario, Canada? Apparently a porta-potti does not.

However, since you don't need a pump out or plumbing for a composting toilet, is it a permanent installation?

This is not a question about the toilet itself (you can argue it either way), but how the Ontario legal system identifies it.
Click to expand...

From what I have researched (this trip is in my plans, too), they will be looking for a deck fitting for pumping out. Since composting toilets don’t have them, then the answer from the refs is “no”, composting toilets are not legal in Ontario.

Has anyone encountered a different result?

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/900343
Click to expand...

There is another issue. In Ontario you cannot have alcohol on boats that do not have a permanent sleeping area + permanent cooking facilities + permanent toilet facilities. For instance, a CD22 does not qualify for having alcohol on board because it typically only has 2 out of the 3 things. Apparently, the first offense is a $500-600 fine.
 
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