Composting toilets; the dry camping boondocker's friend

If you are building a tiny house trailer, certain amenities are not really optional. A comfortable place to sit and work or read, a table, a bed, storage space, power...and a toilet.
Any decent tiny house or boondocking trailer build will have a toilet, because you never know where you are going to park it.
Sure, Walmart's got a bathroom, but most of us aren't wallydocking everywhere we go.
A huge number of state and national forests are available to camp in, but there's no bathroom facilities and you are forbidden from digging pit latrines or burying waste in most of them.
And if you are stealth camping in plain sight you can't really haul around tanks of liquid waste without drawing a lot of attention.
The options are flush, chemical, and composting.
Flush toilets are wasteful beyond belief. The tanks and plumbing take up a lot of space and weigh hundreds of pounds. If you have ever have to haul your own water, you will quickly develop a healthy respect for the amount of drinking water a "low volume" toilet wastes in a modern home. Blackwater stinks to high heaven and gets worse over time, and that waste has to be piped out and disposed of at very specific dumping places, which limits where you can empty them.
Not too stealthy, really.
Chemical toilets are more compact and light but require their specific chemicals to work, which are expensive and take up some space, and once again, the waste is not easy to dispose of except at a toilet or dumping area. And of course, it stinks.
So what we have left is the composting toilet. Before I go much further, I'm going to strongly suggest you read the Humanure Handbook.  <{----

That link opens up to a page with individual chapters you can read online on a superior form of composting toilet technology, and Mr. Jenkins sells the book as well. It's well worth a read.
Composting toilets have numerous advantages for dry campers. They are light, because the entire toilet is a 5 gallon bucket, a seat, and a box of cover material. The cover material can be sawdust, newspaper, cat litter, or anything else appropriate for your use.
If you are in the wild, you can use a composting bucket liner as the bag lining the toilet. Then it can be dumped into a slit trench and the whole thing will compost in place.
In a public area the bag is topped off with cover material, tied up and tossed into a public trashcan, and is far safer in this use than any baby's diaper bag is - the cover material absorbs the moisture and the smells. The bag goes into the regular waste stream, which allows it to go to the dump and be buried there. The amount of waste generated is very small, on the order of 64 ounces/day, which is nothing compared to a flush toilet. It also doesn't convert gallons of drinking water into shit. It is easily the most environmentally friendly method of waste disposal available. This may all seem outlandish to consider, but my best advice to you is to read the Humanure Handbook, and be amazed. 

Remember this cabinet? This is our composting toilet cabinet, which holds our bucket in the center. The TP and bucket liners store in the space on the left, and the sawdust or other cover material stores in the back bin and pours down a chute into the right bin area.

This entire bathroom area fits onto the tongue area of the trailer, so it isn't taking up any of our actual living space, and it's completely self-contained. Note that the Bucket is actually too low and had to be shimmed up to just above the deck level so that the toilet seat closed onto it. Raising the bucket up to the seat holds the bags more securely when in use and prevents any wayward urine from splashing over the top of the bucket if your aim sucks. Sitting down avoids this problem, but bad habits are hard to break. Obviously, I waterproofed the deck and the interior, but I prefer to avoid future issues.

Fitting the seat requires some modification. You need to rotate the seat supports so that they surround the bucket, and you may have to drill new holes and fill in the old holes with epoxy like I did here if the bumpers are press fit rather than screwed in. The end result will close over the top of the bucket and rest lightly on it, holding the bag gently but firmly. You are now ready to take a dump in your ninja tiny house.


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Tags: Humanure Toilet, Composting toilet, Boondocking trailer toilet, Tiny house toilet, Dry camping trailer toilet, Shunpiking trailer toilet, DiY composting toilet, Building a trailer toilet, DiY trailer toilet, Ninja trailer toilet, Dry camping toilet, Boondocking toilet, Mobile Eco-communalism, Workamping toilet, Housetrucker toilet, Dispersed Camping toilet, Allstays toilet, Peace convoy toilet.