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Top 5 FAQs on Composting Toilets
Q: What the heck is a composting toilet?
A: Composting toilets use rapid aerobic decomposition, like a well-turned garden compost pile, to break down wastes. More than 95% of the material that goes into the composter disappears up the vent as water vapor or gases.
Q: Why would I want one?
A: Composting toilets can provide safe waste processing in locations where conventional septic systems are impossible or ill-advised, such as lakeside cabins or clay soils. They’re also less expensive for occasional-use cabins or outbuildings.
Q: How bad do they smell?
A: Forget your outhouse experiences. If a composting toilet smells, it’s telling you something’s wrong.
Q: What’s left, and what do I do with it at the end of composting?
A: There’s a dry, fluffy, odorless material in the finishing drawer. Once every few months you pull out the entire drawer, and carry it out to your fruit trees or ornamental plants. It’s compost! It’s good for them! Use it on gardens with discretion.
Q: When is a composter not a good idea?
A: Apartment dwellers, this isn’t for you. Cold environments are a problem, too. The biological community in a composter likes it 70°F or warmer. Below 50°F the little critters go into hibernation and all composting activity stops. Composting toilets can freeze without harm, but obviously you can’t use them then.
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Please read this if you're thinking of buying a composting toilet: We've had a terrible experience with the Envirolet MS-10 electric waterless self-contained model. It replaced a Sun-Mar Excel that we used in a vacation cottage for about 8 years until misuse by a guest cracked its drum. Envirolet looked great online, so we bought it two years ago. Despite many calls to the tech service and our best efforts to follow their (always slightly different) instructions for use, we are going to throw it out & replace it with another Sun-Mar. The Envirolet is very poorly engineered, and we don't think anyone could get it to truly compost human waste. Specifically: 1) The "mixing bars" just slide back & forth without actually mixing, so material piles up & has to be moved with a stick. 2) The fans and heater rapidly dry the material to the texture of a brick. Trying to move the mixing bars after a couple days of running the fan and heater resulted in shearing off the flanges on the mixing bar, so the whole unit had to be taken apart to replace the mixing bars, a dirty job. 3) At the same time, liquid (=urine) accumulated rapidly in the bottom drawer, sometimes leaking out. 4) The dried material formed big chunks that would not drop down into the bottom drawer for removal. The unit had to be emptied by hand with a trowel & lots of paper towel, another dirty job. When we called Envirolet to ask for help as these problems arose, they told us variously: a) don't put any toilet paper into the unit; b) avoid urinating into the unit (!); c) spray the mass inside the unit down daily with water or accelerator to keep it moist; c) add more peat; d) add peat mixed with wood shavings; e) stir the mass up with a stick; f) turn the fan and heater on and off as often as necessary to keep the mass moist but not wet. Following these instructions took a lot of time but did not solve the problems. The material still wasn't composting, fresh poop inevitably mixed with the older dried stuff, and urine accumulated no matter how rarely we peed into it. We began to feel we'd be better off just using a bucket. We are enthusiastic, experienced composters (and have PhDs in microbiology and ecology, respectively), so we aren't squeamish or technophoblic, but we have been forced to recognized that the Envirolet had a bad design and nothing we might do will make it work as advertised. Two years & $2,000 later we are poorer but wiser. Plenty of others had the same experience - check out the reviews elsewhere on the web.