Outhouse Kind Of Question

NOT SURE IF THIS IS WHERE IS SHOULD POST THIS, BUT HERE GOES_



Hey Y'All-

We just moved into the woods. We have a cabin off of the highway, on top of a mountain, in the middle of the wilderness. It's the most amazing place I've EVER lived, and mostly it's nice.

The problem is that we have one outhouse, which is so cute, I'll have to post pics of it. I use it rarely because it's out a ways from the house and we have an indoor toilet.

The problem with the indoor toilet is that we have no running water. We fill up these two small tanks for showers and doing the dishes ...about every two weeks, from the community well (about one house over, everybody shares it and it's mostly used for drinking water). We have one indoor toilet which is like an RV toilet. We use it only for pee, puting the toilet paper in the trash, and emptying the bucket at the end of the pipe, into the outhouse, whenever it gets full.

This is where my question comes from. The bucket is really small. I get really disgusted when I have to empty it every two days. There won't fit any bigger of a bucket in there, and even if there would, how would I carry it to the outhouse? If I wanted to dig a pipe from the house to the outhouse, I'd have to pay a drilling company to come out, because we pretty much live on top of solod rock. I just can't afford it right now.

What can I do? Do I just have to come to terms with the fact that I have to empty the pee toilet every two days or use the outhouse in below freezing temperatures this winter? Hhhhmmmm, need advice from someone who knows their rustic.

Thanks!

 

I'm looking into a similar dwelling - we have rocky ground here but rarely is the whole ground rocky, usually in patches. You didn't say what happened to the waste when it gets taken to the out house, so I apologise if some of the ideas below do not fit the problem. Anyway, these are just some general thoughts in hopefully increasing usefulness:

* Consider relocating the toliet to another location. I know nothing about the layout of your site though so this probably isn't practical.

* Consider using a saw-dust based toliet. Instead of having a flush system, you throw in a handful of sawdust and it becomes a sort of a composting waste system instead. This probably doesn't fit your problem as I didn't quite understand the bit about moving the waste to the out building, but even so - maybe something to think about if you relocate the toliet.

* Instead of the mayhem of digging into the rock to put a pipe underground, raise up the toliet so that the pipe travels above ground (like an oil pipeline!). Remember to use a proper waste pipe with the correct-radius bends, 150mm width, etc. I presume the site is on a slope so it goes towards the outhouse btw! If you worry about the visual impact of an external pipe, I guess you could hide it by building a makeshift earth wall around it or some such.

* Leave the toliet as it is, and in addition to your rubber gloves, wear a vapour mask. I wear a vapour mask when I'm doing resin work, which smells like rotting fish at worst. With the mask in place - I can't smell a thing (plus I don't get brain damage)!

* Use a macerator (not sure if they are called that in the U.S.). You will of course need an electricity supply of some kind for this. Basically, the macerator will churn up the waste so it will travel down a normal fluids pipe (rather than a fatter waste pipe). You can then send it along it's merry way with a flow of water. Make sure you buy a quality macerator - if it goes wrong and stops working it's presumably not a nice job to fix!

* Use a pump with a macerator. If you need to get the "fluid" uphill a bit you will need a pump. Depending on how far upwards the fluid has to travel, you will need a pump with an appropriate rating. Make sure it's a "dirty water" pump, and not a clean water one - otherwise it probably won't be able to cope.

* Whatever solution you choose - research the topic in greater detail with books or via the Internet at least. Obviously if your solution goes wrong, the resultant mess doesn't bear thinking about. I've heard horror stories about incorrectly installed macerators for instance!

That's all I can think of right now. This isn't the most pleasant topics I've posted on, but you have to admit it's a fascinating subject!

 

http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html

 

Hey You! Thanks so much for this link, it is definitely food for thought.

A WORD WITH THE AUTHOR

Joseph Jenkins says,
"The Humanure Handbook has been discussed on international radio, and on U.S. television. It was covered by the Associated Press, and in various national publications - even mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and Playboy magazine. It was roundly vilified on Howard Stern's radio show where I was censored - twice! - for daring to utter words that no one must ever hear on the airwaves, including the "s" word (when I honestly asserted that one of Stern's fake call-in people was "full of shit"). More surprisingly, however, Stern censored out the following statement I made during the interview: "I have composted all of my family's humanure in my backyard for 20 years, and have grown a food garden with it the entire time." These words were not allowed to reach the tender ears of Howard Stern's audience. As soon as my interview was over, however, the listeners were instead titillated with playful songs about anal intercourse. Funny world, this. Funny creatures, humans.
In the United States, humans take flush toilets for granted. You take your dump into a large bowl of drinking water, then flush it. End of story. That's the civilized thing to do. But where does the flushed material go? What would happen if everyone in the world crapped in their drinking water supplies? Why doesn't any other land mammal defecate deliberately in water? Why do we? These all seem like questions any reasonably curious person would ask once in a while. What if the toilet won't flush? Then what? How long can you hold it? People actually crap in ziplock bags and put them in the trash during power outages. Really.

What if I told you that two five gallon buckets and a large bag of peat moss, sawdust, or even shredded junk mail will make an odorless, waterless, environmentally friendly emergency toilet for one person for two weeks. If a compost bin and a steady supply of sawdust, peat, leaves, etc. is available, that toilet could last indefinitely - literally for decades, even lifetimes. The system can be modified to suit a variety of environments and locales, and can be expanded, with municipal support, to conceivably deal with the odorous excretions of any number of human beings."

I really liked it when he said this, "In fact, sometimes I feel like I did beam down from another planet when I see all the crazy things humans do to the Earth's environment."

I can totally relate to that statement.

 

Wait a minute, my husband says that if we do the composting toilet, then it will attract the bears. Any kind of compost attracts bears supposedly. I hear that this type of toilet doesn't omit any kind of odor, and it's easily maintained. And if it's buried a little, then maybe the bears won't smell it. What's the deal? I want compost!

 

The quoted text that you posted suggested that with a considerable enough volume of sawdust or similar material it would be odourless. In any event, I think "compost" and "composting toliet" are two different things. Generally a compost heap tends to contain all sorts of household waste including that old bears favourite - food scraps.

In contast, I'm not sure bears are that keen on a composting material based primarily on excretia! Check this link out! :

http://www.yellowstone-bearman.com/B_housesafe.html

 

hey i realy don't know anything about how bears relate to compost piles or smell of feces. jenkins is explicit that well balanced heap - carbon-nitrogen ratio - don't have any odor and i believe him. but animals' sense of smell is stronger and different so... try to search the web on that specific matter.

btw, this kind of toilet jenkins describe is in-house toilet. practicaly type of toilet you already have but point is in sawdust or similar material to act as odour-filter.

keep us informed, i'm very interesting - unfortunately i'm living in a city in a building so i know only theory

 

Did you know that back in the days before indoor plumbing, that cleaning out the bog was considered "men's work", and, only after moving it indoors and making it out of white porcelain did it become "women's work"? It strikes me that you're making just enough concessions to modern toiletry to make it still be women's work, without any of the conveniences that should go with it.

My suggestion is to get rid of the toilet that you have to empty out. Tell everyone to go the outhouse or piss in the yard or have their own individual slopping out jar that they are responsible for if they don't want to walk out back. A large covered plastic jar will get you through the night; pour it out on the ground the next morning. Add a little bleach now and then to keep it smelling fresh. Learn to piss into a coffee can while standing up and then throw it on the soil. That's where piss belongs -- returning nitrogen to the plants.

But there's no way I would be responsible for anybody's piss but my own now that my kids are grown.

 

if bears were attracted to degrading human fecal matter, than your outhouse would have a hell of a problem by now. i can't imagine this would particularly attract bears...rather things like rotting vegetables and other foods would be a problem....but i dont know a hell of a lot about bears, so dont trust me entirely

 

We have an outhouse...and we use it all winter. I'd say just pee on the ground. That's what we do up here.

 

u live in like a wooden cabin, u dont have running water, and yet u have the internet?
u hippies are FUNNY

 

yeah, like, I do. Glad you could have a laugh, now go away. Oh my god, like totally.

 

lene
Like yea, we can live in the woods, shit in the woods, and like totally have Phones, and internet!

to answer your question, the pee on the ground is what we do. we poop into 5 gallon buckets. first we put some sawdust or wood chips down. then poop and cover. we empty that in to a whole in the ground when full put on the rubber gloves and wash with bleach. never is too nasty.

my friends who have small youth keep a pee pot it is a p-nut butter bucket that the youth pee into it is hard to get kids to pee outside until they are 5ish.

but pooping in a bucket in normal everyday business here

 

. I like you.

 

we used a sawdust toilet for awhile (and live in the woods) and the smell was only bad when we had parties, which was not often! Joe Jenkins is my hero! I love him and have had the honor to hear him speak, he he he.
I think it is easier to cary a bucket that is semi-solid from the sawdust, than a bucket of liquid anyway (though I've never done the later)
Never heard of the bear thing with humanure, but we live in a place where bears are unfortunatly few and far between!
We eventually got a regular running water toilet, mostly because that was in our plans to begin with. My kids actually prefer the sawdust! We have well water, so our rule is "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down" . When we go to my folks house, she reminds my daughter, at my house we flush every time!
After all that blabbing, I highly suggest the sawdust toilet. It may even be helpful for those early morning poops in the middle of winter!

 

Hey There!

Thanks for the post! I just got done PMing you about peyote stitch and here you are again! Where are you living? We are eventually going to get a well also, but I am so satisfied with the way our sawdust toilet is going, I may not even want to hook it up to my toilets. Plus, we live in Boulder County, and they just passed a law that you aren't allowed to have a holding tank on your property here unless you have a seasonal prop. We would have to get a leach field, which for one, we don't have enough land for, and two, is entirely too expensive for us.