Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

There are all sorts of methods out there.

The Humanure Handbook is definitely a good resource and a pretty good read too! The benefits to the bucket toilet method are that you don't really have to build much of anything. (I don't really see making a frame for the toilet seat as being a bit deal nor do I see sinking a few posts and attaching some fencing for the compost bins as a big project.) The sawdust bucket toilet is pretty darn simple. There are no issues with the toilet stinking up the house, if you ever find that to be the case, you just need more or better cover material for the buckets or you need some newer buckets (really old and scratched up plastic can start to hold onto odors though washing them and letting dry in the sun usually takes care of the problem.) If the compost outside smells, you just need more cover material. Really quite simple. If it smells add more cover material.

When you start getting into making automatic systems, you kinda need to tell the future in order to create a system that will not only function but also not be a stinky nuisance. Some management will need to be done. If you intend to spread the finished product on the ground, you really should make sure it got to a sufficient temperature and is allowed to age an appropriate amount of time.

There are plans out there for solar toilets and all sorts of things. There are also those urine separating toilets but again, I personally don't like the more complex/high tech methods because I've not really ever heard that they work that well.

As to using an IBC or large rolling trash bin. Yes I believe this could be made to work. There are some people doing the humanure composting set ups for music festivals that use the big rolling trash bins. They install a perferated pipe down into them so that aeration can happen. The bottom of the bin starts out with an amount of sawdust or other cover material. The "out houses" are build over where the bins can be situated and the stalls have fresh cover materials for people to add after doing their business. As the bins fill up they are rolled out of the way and fresh bins rolled in. The humanure is allowed to age for a year before being used around the festival grounds allowing the bins to be used again the next festival. I suppose something similar could be done with an IBC. Some one needs to manage the compost, making sure it heats up in the early stages after filling the bin and then make sure it maintains an appropriate amount of moisture through the curing and aging process. Biggest problem with plastic bins is they don't breath well and maintaining proper aeration and moisture is difficult even with tons of holes drilled in the bins.

As to huge vaults that don't need to be emptied often and don't use extra carbon material for cover........ I'm sorry, I've never actually used one that I really enjoyed. Even with vent pipes, they still usually stink a bit especially in hot weather.

Sorry not to be more supportive to the alternative ideas but if you try the bucket toilet idea for a while, you may find it isn't nearly as distasteful as you think. There really is something great about tending a compost pile that gets really hot!

The large long term bins are the same as the 5 gallon bucket. You poo and cover with saw dust. The difference is that the large bin has the ability to hold 35 years of waste. There have bee such setup working for years of continuous use since 1939(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y52Lmv_qw-0). The solar stack or fan is only added for a little comfort. To me it just seems like a huge version of the 5 gallon bucket where it compost in place. They do not recommend using the compost on veggies so I guess its not a hot compost process..

It is a pretty little video but they don't explain how their "tanks" actually deal with the waste without odor problems or how it makes the urine into safe fertilizer.

Most comercial composting toilet systems are not hot composting systems and therefore fall a bit short of closing the nutrient cycle.

Since my last post I read the Humanure handbook. Started composting some of the stuff saved up from the Biolet to check it out. In spite of conventional teaching the book says do not turn the pile. With that and using the high nitrogen human poop the pile is hot and staying wet. That is a first here in the dry dessert. I tried for two years to compost without the human poop and turning often. No heat and drying out daily. I gave it up, but have to change my opinion.

Further I tried adding to the pile some of my wash water and emultions from making biodiesel. It worked fine. Nights here now are freezing or below so I loosely proped a glass cover over the pile. At sunrise temps are 100 to 115 deg. F. when I check the pile and add to it. I am using spilled hay from the goats and bedding from the chickens and rabbits as the carbon, just enough to cover the added poop. This really is amazing.

I am so impressed, I will take out the remaining flush toilet and put in a bucket job. I do not have a ready source of sawdust so will use soil and wood ash in the bucket. Without that toilet I can now divert the pipe to the septic tank and put in a graywater recovery system. I will use two gravel growbeds and raise fodder for the goats. Perhaps bamboo. They will drain to a small pond with fish and water plants. Kind of like AP in reverse. The pond will be next to existing grapes and be used to irrigate them to keep water moving thru the system.

Interesting video. Somewhat like the French drains we use on the farm except we use water. The water both transports solids and the water trap prevents odour.... so I do wonder how odour is prevented in this system. Looks to be a neat and easy installation in a new building.

Spirit,
We use a combination of cover materials in our buckets. Sawdust seems to work best for covering odor but we use shredded paper to absorb liquid. Kinda fun thinking about using junk mail in the toilet. Used coffee grounds can be used some as cover in the toilet but they have a strong odor of their own and you can't really keep them around too long or they get moldy. Using too much soil and wood ash might be a bit detrimental to the composting process but you do what you have to to make things work. In our outdoor bins we use other people's bagged leaves as cover material. I know some people in arid places will do their composting in pits or in hard sided bins to help reduce wind drying of the contents. Even big chunks or cardboard around the outside of the bin between the contents and the fencing can assist in holding moisture.

I agree that the secret ingredient of good hot compost is urine. Even if people are unwilling to do the humanure thing, many will still be open to using urine to fix up their compost.

Do your compost piles ever have odor?

There is a screen in the tank so liquid drains out the bottom to let liquids drain through and air move upward. The sawdust ect gives surface area for the bacteria and the urin runs down through the "pile" and supposedly comes out converted to low odor nitrates and is stored in a buried 55 gallon drum. Its looks almost like setting up you humanure compost pile under the shoot/bucket. Only the bucket is large enough to hold 3 times a years waste and the composting process is able to cope with the load for 30 years before there is enough compost to fill the "bucket".

I have read the humanure book. I am going to try this. Everything seems just like standard humanure composting, only without the transporting of raw waste in a small bucket and small earthworms are added to the pile to aerate it. My wife will go for this method too!! So that makes it a winner over the 5 gallon bucket. The only condition is that I install a flap under the toilet seat that can be opened after she sits down; similar to some of those sorry commercial composting toilets. This way she never has to look into the hole aside from pouring sawdust in after a poo. The flap is not to poo on and then "flush" but to simple provide a visual barrier when going to sit down, lol.

Please let us know how your project goes. I will be interested to know. I do understand that some people really can't be bothered to manage humanure and those people really shouldn't as they could give Humanure composting a bad name by making a nuisance instead of a nice compost system.

For your toilet seat with flap. I highly recommend making the flap work automatically when a weight presses on the toilet seat. If one sits down and forgets to open the flap before letting go...... well the toilet and flap would be really gross and smelly very quickly.

The reason I'm rather confused about the system is that I didn't see any "cover material" containers by the "toilets" If people are not sprinkling a bit of cover material over their deposits into the system, then it really isn't like humanure composting. I can understand how a tank or a bin can hold several years worth of solids if no extra cover materials are added to "cover" the odor or balance the CN ratio and compost. If you are adding cover material like in Humanure composting, I don't see how anything but a huge vault could handle a family for more than a year or two.

Granted, our compost piles handle any food/garden waste that doesn't go to the chickens or worms as well as two adults using a bucket toilet. We can easily fill up a 5' by 5' by 5' compost bin in less than a year. Now if the compost bin was only going to handle the toilet, I expect we would be ok with a 4' by 4' by 4' bin per year but that is only two of us.

Right, now if your compost bin were 3 times that size it would take years to fill up because volume breakdown happens faster over time. That first year there is very little reduction of volume compared to the next few years. Say 100% volume the first year, but the second year only 30% of the first years volume remains and the the third year only 14% of the first years volume remains. By the fourth year only something 8% remains. In 5 years something like 162% of a years volume is contained. So with a container that can hold 3 years worth of volume, it takes a very long time to fill up.

If your 4*4*4 bin can hold a years worth (64 cubic feet) then three times that would be 192 cubic feet, the cube root comes out to a bin that is 5.77 by 5.77 by 5.77 feet. a 6 foot cube. Not a huge vault by any means.

Well, we will see how it goes. Im just excited that we can finally stop flushing drinking water to get rid of our poo! I would much rather use that water to top off my ap system

Im thinking that I may pour a slab and get a pallet jack. Then I can pull out the ibc and set a second in place. If I do this every year or two I will have a supply of compost for improving my dirt. IM thinking it will take 4 IBC containers to hold a years worth. Funny thing, they said one IBC could handle all poo and paper and sawdust for a year that two people could produce. An IBC only holds 33 cubic feet.

Here is the 20 year diagram for Long-Term Composting toilet on Highway E6 in Sweden; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4XRDYnIf0U

Second is how they process the liquid slowly through a "fiter bed"

Looking at the pile that is aging for hopeful use in March or April, about half of the original volume still remains and that pile actually got turned which usually causes extra volume loss. I think the length of time for volume to reduce will be greatly affected by the particular type of cover material and the composting conditions.

Our sawdust is mostly pine and cypress which is slow to break down (hard wood sawdust breaks down much faster I understand) but we are also in a hot wet climate which tends to cause organic matter to vanish double time.

Having the compost break down outside on the ground has the benefit of allowing worms and other living things to move into it at the appropriate time without our personal intervention. (worms don't do well in hot compost or materials with too much urine, they usually wait till the compost is cooling and aging.)

for Pallet bins, you will want to put in some aeration pipes or something I expect but with the equipment to swap bins, you should be in good shape. Just make sure in your drainage plans that you arn't in danger of your vault space flooding.

Good point about the flooding!

As I have said in this thread I stored poop from a composting toilet for a couple of years in closed plastic drums. The urine was seperated and used on fruit trees. I was planning on using the poop in an anerobic digester. Now I am composting out of the oldest drum. The only stink was from the lidded drums without the seal buckled down. The pile does not stink. It makes the hottest pile I've ever experienced. But the stuff in the drum is consistancy of thick custard, DanDman, you would have to cut open the IBC to get it out. This first drum is from when I was adding mulch to each poop. A drum holds about a year worth of poop for my family of two.

The problem with compost toilets is that the carbon to nitrogen ratio is not enough to give a hi temp process. That results in stuff that is not safe for use on edible crops. The same problem with your IBC idea, you will still have to compost the stuff with 15 or 30 to one straw or hay. Otherwise you wont get a hot pile to kill pathogens. The bottom of your full IBC may have had long enough low temp composting to kill the bad stuff but the upper portion will still be bad. With the urine in there too you will have an anerobic condition at the bottom so it may not even do low tmep composting.

You could find open top plastic drums and cut the top to fit a shoot from your toilet. Replace it when full with an empty one and start composting out of the full one. You can cover the full drum with the original lid form the 2nd one and scoop out as desired for your pile. With your larger family and with the urine it wont take as long to fill. I suspect with the urine in there you will have a stinky hateful mess.

I wish I had read Humanure two years ago. I would now have sweet compost to use on garden. I belive handling the buckets would have been easier and more pleasent than the handling the aged stuff.

Its works just like the humanure composting. You add sawdust, you dont turn the pile and there is air. The IBC has a strainer in the bottom where pee exits to a separate 50 gallon drum(75% of nutrients is in the pee). There is also a screened opening to bring air in and up. The top side is hooked to a vent tube with a fan on a solar stack so air will always be moving over the pile. It should not be anaerobic the pee keeps the pile wet. If sawdust is not enough carbon then I can mix in some hard wood charcoal with the sawdust.

This one is for all you TCL and all humanure composters out there.
I made this, feel free to use it or spread it any way you see fit.