When Nature Calls

Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of experience, err, pooping, outdoors. Since “How will I go to the bathroom?” is a common concern for people who are just starting to look into mold avoidance, I thought I’d write a post to share all I’ve learned.

I’ve also recently put it together that our family is reacting to the black tanks in our trailer. I’ve heard some people say that no matter what you do, RVs go bad after about a year, and I wonder if this is why. No worries if it is – once we got the compost toilet installation right, it completely solved this problem. I’ll talk about that more below.

Our Casita did not have a bathroom, so we dove straight into the crux of the problem. Our Coachmen did, and for a while we had permanent hookups and things in the poop department were smooth sailing. But then we went off grid and had to get creative again. We’ve seen and done it all, and I’m hear to tell you what we learned.

Cathole

A cathole is just a hole you dig in the ground.

I’ll be honest. As a lifelong camper, I don’t love this option. I’ve seen too many beautiful places scarred by a suspicious-looking mound with streaky toilet paper sticking out of it. It’s just too gross. People don’t always use their common sense when digging catholes.

I did have to use catholes once. It was on a Hipcamp spot that did not have septic. The owners asked me to use catholes, gave me a sharp shovel, told me exactly where to dig and how deep to go. I was very careful to cover everything up completely so there was no trace when I was done. Still, the holes attracted flies and were generally gross. Not my first choice, but works in a pinch.

On public or BLM land, just don’t. Please. Not unless it’s a one time thing and you have no other choice. Don’t ruin other peoples’ experience with your poo. Find another option.

Bucket potty

Your standard bucket potty is your simplest option. You can buy the whole bucket, or just a seat that snaps onto a regular 5 gallon bucket. You can buy bags which you just tie up and toss in the trash when full. People say to put kitty litter in the bottom. You could also treat this as a compost toilet and layer in rice hulls or pine shavings.

Pros

Cheap

Easier to find a trash can than a septic dump

Portable

Disposable

Cons

Mixing urine and poo results in sewage. If you start adding in cat litter or even compost filler, it can start to get heavy and bulky rather quickly. It can also be messy in a trash can if there are leaks (and that’s not a mess anyone wants to deal with…ewww.)

Cassette toilet

While we were traveling in the Casita with no bathroom, we generally used a cassette toilet in a utility tent.

These work on a similar premise as the regular toilets we all know and love. You fill up a tank with water, and then every time you use it you pump to get water pressure and flush. You end up with a miniature black tank that you can flush down a sewer, a toilet, or a cathole.

I needed to empty it once a day.

Pros

These work most like the toilets we’re all used to

Cons

You can’t throw the waste in a trash. You need to flush it somewhere.

These use fresh water. You could use stream water or whatever but you do have to add water to make them work.

RV toilet

Your standard RV toilet looks and acts a lot like a house toilet. The only difference is that you flush by stepping on a lever rather than pulling a handle. When you flush, fresh water flushes everything into the black tank.

Pros

This option is going to seem the most “normal” to most of us.

It’s nice to have everything disappear into the black tank, and then once a week pull a lever and have it all disappear into the sewer or septic. It’s just the easiest option.

Cons

I recently put it together that my family is reacting to the black tank. I think this might be why people sometimes say that RVs go bad after a certain period of time, no matter what you do. We detoxed into that black tank and whatever’s in there, (probably MT) our bodies do not like. We sealed off both black tanks and our symptoms resolved overnight, so I know it was an issue for us.

You have to put an additive into the tank to, err, dissolve things. We used Happy Camper and it didn’t seem toxic and seemed to work.

You need to flush the black tank on a fairly regular basis to clean up buildup. Our new trailer came with a cleanout hookup that I could just attach a hose to. (It always leaked inside, under the sink, so beware of this.) If your trailer doesn’t come with a cleanout hookup, you can buy hose attachments that go backwards up into the tank and spray it out.

Another trick we used is to put a bunch of ice down the toilet when you’re driving it around. The ice will slosh around and scrub down the walls while you drive, and then melt and disappear.

Most trailers come with black tank indicators, which promptly get gummed up and stop working. I learned to tell when it was time to dump based on the smell. If it was stinky, it was time.

Creative dumping options

For a long time we had permanent hookups and it was glorious. Once a week I’d go out and pull the lever. Bye bye black tank. A scoop of Happy Camper and we’d start again. Once a month I’d flush the tanks. It was stinkier than I liked but generally okay. But then, we went off grid stationary on our own property, and had to get creative.

There was a septic but it was uphill from where we were parked. Okay, we thought, we’ll pump it uphill. (Spoiler: For those of you thinking to yourselves that sh!t doesn’t flow uphill, you’re correct.)

We don’t have a truck big enough to tow our trailer. It’s parked on a precarious hillside spot where it had to be pushed in with a tractor. It’s not like we could just drive away to dump the tanks.

We tried to make a pump out of a garbage disposal. There were Youtube videos about how to do it. We thought we had it nailed. Unfortunately it didn’t do anything. It just churned the water around. Didn’t pump it anywhere. Waste of a perfectly good garbage disposal.

So then we bought a macerator pump. It worked exactly twice. Then a piece exploded or something and it stopped working. So we were left with full tanks and nowhere to dump them.

So then we thought – tote! People dump into totes. We’ll do that. We bought one from Walmart (because it was the fastest option), filled it up. Let me just say that a 42 gallon tote filled with poop sloshing around is heavy. And remember I said the septic is uphill? Specifically it’s up a steep, rocky hill studded with poky manzanitas. So we were basically pulling it through an obstacle course. We have two toilets, and thus two black tanks, and by then they really needed to be flushed. All in all we lugged that tote up the hill at least 6 times.

Never again.

So, now we had almost a thousand dollars into a pump and garbage disposal and tote, and none of it was working.

And besides that, at this point we were trucking in every drop of water we used, and flushing good water down the drain just didn’t make sense.

So, enough already. We gave up on the black tank. Not working. We decided to try a compost toilet.

Compost toilet

I had just read The Humanure Handbook as part of a Permaculture class I was taking, and was already feeling enamored with the idea of a compost toilet. We, as humans in the western world, waste a lot of perfectly good drinking water by flushing it down the toilet to water down our poop. We’re facing a shortage of water as part of the whole global warming/earth is dying mess we’re in right now, and this really doesn’t seem very smart to me. Plus, on a personal level, I believe that part of the reason we got so sick was because of MT in the sewers. Humanure by itself is fine; it’s just fertilizer. Humanure mixed with toxic chemicals in a sewer system just seems like a bad idea for so many reasons. And lately I’ve been reading articles about bio sludge – a toxic mess of hazardous waste and poop being used to water edible crops… Suffice it to say, this is a mess that I’d rather steer clear of, if possible. Hence, compost toilet.

My husband is more practical and less of an idealist than me. He would rather just flush and have it go away. But given our impossible black tank situation, he was willing to try.

So, he built me a compost toilet using the plans in the Humanure handbook. It’s basically a wooden box that fits around a 5 gallon bucket, with a toilet seat on top. The photo at the top of this post shows a picture of it.

You could alternately use the bucket potty I pointed to at the beginning of this post.

You put some rice hulls or sawdust on the bottom, and then add more every time you go. I get rice hulls from the local feed store. When the bucket is full, you put a lid on the bucket and change to a new bucket. When you have a bunch of buckets, you dump it in a special humanure compost pile (or double bag and trash it if you don’t have access to a pile.)

It works well. We used it in a tent. It’s simple to use. It doesn’t really stink because it doesn’t have time to. We were filling up a bucket a day.

I keep a humanure compost pile in an out of the way spot. I had some wire compost bins that we zip tied together, but you could build one with pallets too. The Humanure Handbook has plans for a fancy one. Regardless, you need a dedicated compost pile because, to be safe, it needs to sit for a few years before being used as fertilizer.

When I’ve got several buckets worth, I take them all to our humanure pile. I dump everything (sloshy stinky mess) into the pile, duck out of the way of oversplash. I rinse all the buckets with a liter water bottle with a squirt top that’s been filled with mostly water and a splash of bleach. I cover the pile with a fresh layer of rice hulls, set the buckets in the sun to dry and sanitize, and we start over. Properly covered, the pile doesn’t stink at all and is not attracting flies.

We still use this option in a tent as our guest bathroom on the property. It’s relatively sanitary. It’s not too much of a leap for people to get their heads around. Not much different than a pit toilet. It’s fairly easy for me to empty when they leave.

This is a good, simple, cheap option if you are stationary and have a place to put a humanure pile.

However, the part I still didn’t like was that this solution mixes urine and poo. If you separate them, it’s less stinky and more sanitary. Hence, the Nature’s Head.

Nature’s Head

Okay so this is where we are now.

The Nature’s Head costs around a thousand dollars. It’s not cheap. But we’d already sunk that into trying to dump our black tank, which turned out to be a total waste. (Pun not intended.) So we decided to go for it.

We used it outside in a tent for a while to make sure we wanted to stick with it before we did the work of retrofitting it into our trailer. I’m glad we did because there’s a bit of a learning curve with it, and we had some yucky leaks that I’m glad happened outside.

This toilet works on the concept of separating urine and poop. The urine tank gets dumped daily. We dump it into the forest. The poop gets dessicated with coco coir and the whole thing needs to be dumped once a week into a humanure pile, or trashed.

When you do empty the poo, it’s much more pleasant than the homemade compost toilet, because it’s basically dry and fluffy and odor-free. You don’t have to clean the tank. You just add more coco coir and keep going.

Unlike the black tank, it does not have an odor. There is virtually no smell. Just for this reason alone, I like it better than the regular RV toilet. But I also like that we’re not using any of our hard-earned drinking water to flush. And I like that what comes out of it will eventually become fertilizer for the fruit trees I’ll one day plant, instead of toxic waste that needs to be pumped out and is then trucked off to be mixed with other toxic waste that has nowhere to go and adds to the cesspool of human waste.

The one thing I don’t like is that the whole thing basically has to be dismantled to dump the poo bin. But it’s only once a week. It’s a downside, but one I can live with.

We tried at first to pipe it so that the urine diverter fed directly into the black tank. That’s when I put it together that the family is reacting to the black tank. We put the original urine tank back on and sealed the black tank again and have been fine ever since. For this reason we will probably stick with the compost toilet, even after we have hookups again.