Composting Toilet

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The title will either scare you or intrigue you!

Whether you are RV-ing for a weekend or planning on a location independent lifestyle, dealing with the poops and peeps (I’ve been an nanny for so many years these are the terms I’m most familiar with!!) is a common thread in any online search.

In your S&B you may not give the plumbing a second thought until Uncle Steve comes over and plugs up the toilet. It’s a relative easy fix – a simple plunger and poof it flushes away, though you may wish you had a gas mask. In an RV, EVERYTHING that goes in you need to have a game plan of how it is going to go out. We camped when our kids were young and we had a broken sewer hose ‘incident’. It was not pretty and I learned corn does not break down in the digestion process – shudder. I would be lying if that wasn’t one of that last time we ‘camped’ – cruise ships here we come!

You can imagine we have been studying the pros and cons of a standard RV water flushing toilet and the muck and mire it involves in emptying a black tank vs a composting toilet with dry ‘soil’. Like watching a horror movie, the first composting toilet video we saw was horrendous, it was everything you do not do and it scared the poop out of me! As we watched other videos to give it a fair shot, I would cover my eyes while peaking through my fingers in fear. It was hard not to think the @GonewiththeWynn’s were full of crap when they said how clean a composting toilet is and how easy it was to maintain. @FateUnbound and @Drivinandvibin have great videos about their toilets but we still needed to hear from someone we knew to get the true scoop. @TheMotorhomeExperment changed his sold waste container in his living room and he did a close up shot. Now, maybe the first time I watched I had my eyes closed but then I bravely opened my eyes and it looked like soil, as advertised! If Paul and Lorena could do it, so could we. Though I did send one last message to Kevin @VeganRV ‘are you sure???’

Our GMC Motorhome Eleganza 2 has a combined gray/black 40 gallon tank which limits our boondocking capabilities – sharing the black tank with dirty dish water and shower water would fill it so quickly so we would have to leave to dump the tank. Using coconut coir or peat moss to absorb and begin the composting process for the solid tank is definitely the way to go for us. The urine is diverted into a separate container and though it needs to be changed more frequently (every few days perhaps), the solid tank may go three to four weeks before we have to empty.

There are two major composting toilet company’s to choose from. We chose Airhead over the other for a few reasons. The Airhead has a seal on the toilet lid which gives us extra security since we have a wetbath – and you don’t want liquids mixing with the solids. It also has a more traditional ‘home’ toilet seat then the other. And with the Airhead the urine container can be removed to empty without having to expose the solids . These features made the extra $100 or so over the price of the competitor well worth it to us.

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The toilet was relatively easy to install. Because we have a wet bath we wanted to be sure we weren’t drilling extra holes in the fiberglass. We removed the toilet and put a plug into the gray/black tank and then cut a piece of plywood to close off the hole then filled the area with fiberglass. After waiting for it to dry we sanded it to a smooth finish. Centering the composting toilet to be sure there was room for the handle that turns the solids/soil on one side and the hose that houses the fan for air circulation on the other side was not difficult but an important step. Because we had removed the hot water tank which had been housed in the lower bathroom shelf we cut a hole to fit the hose just under that shelf so the pipe and the 12 volt wiring could feed through that area. We have it vented through the compartment that holds the propane tank. While I may have mismarked where the urine tank mounts go so ‘we’ had to fill those small holes with fiberglass (again), the toilet is now installed and does not leak or smell and we are so happy with this upgrade in our motorhome.