I've made a couple of these and they are great cheap toilet for the DIY'er. The wheels mean that it is easier to move a bin full of crap around. On the other hand, one of the design issues is that a full wheelie bin this size is very heavy and difficult to maneuver in a small tight space (which is generally where they are). So not recommended for the average person to have to move a full bin this size- you don't want any bins tipping over which can happen as they are so tall and top heavy!! Options are to only fill the bin to 2/3 the volume or you can get wheelie bins in smaller sizes, but the trade off is that they will fill quicker. The smaller bins will also benefit setups where you have height restrictions and cannot install the bigger bins. You need to think about the access to the bin under the pedestal and getting the bin to where it will compost (needs 6-10 months as mentioned) while another one is being used. An addition to this model is installing a fan in the upper side or top of the bin and associated piping to reduce smells and increase air circulation to help the composting process and also a urine diverting seat and associated piping will greatly reduce bad odors! This has been revolutionary in our DIY composting toilet journey- installing a urine diverting seat. No more stinking toilet smells once you divert/ remove the urine from the pile- it's amazing!! If you go with peeing in the main chamber, be mindful of where you attach the urine drain as when you move the bin fittings can be easily snapped and in my experience are usually a point of leakage so seal them well! But I can't recommend enough diverting the urine from the pile in the first place. You also want to have the installation of the urine drain easy to access for cleaning and maintenance. A few tips.... .
Yup. 96 gallon Toters are quite heavy when full. Their advantage is large diameter wheels. As long as the ground is hard and flat, they're pretty easy to move. If not, I make a path with corrugated corrugated cardboard or old fence boards. If you don't have a lot of material, you can make two 6-foot sections and advance by moving one section at a time.
Can you show us the type of toilet installed and how it connects to the wheelie bin downpipe please. Also in another video you showed how to connect a downpipe to help further wick the smells away please
I feel like there was a whole section of this video missing? It went from placing a drainage layer to adding sawdust to suddenly closing the lid and leaving for 10months. No in between of explaining how the actual toilet works and the inside toilet etc? Would love to learn all that bit too....can you make another more detailed version for us green learners pleasw:0)
Compost _toilet,_ (this is a bin ! for storage - it is is the next step in the process) ideally one of those toilets that separate urin and the feces or much more sawdust would be needed. They have them in campers (there is a lever and if you pull it, the whole in the back opens for number 2. If it is pee only it runs into an always open hole into the canister for urin, that can be emptied separately. And every shit must be covered by enough saw dust / wood chips that it will not stink (again people with nice campers use them). When the container for the solids is full they empty that (I think camping grounds handle that), or one would emty the content in the bin like the one model that Geoff showed. Then they put the container back and people can use the compost toilet again (maybe giving some sawdust on the bottom as well so the walls inside do not get dirty.
It's, in It's simplest form, an outhouse. You build a box to set on that is placed over top the delivery pipe. You keep fresh sawdust in the same space. When you're done "depositing" you "flush" with a can or two of fresh sawdust. Whe. The wheely bin is full is how you know to move/exchange it. The beauty is, the sawdust added each time eliminates/blocks the odor. (I don't expect you to believe that, but it's true). The tricky part is realizing that you need a toilet space with a floor elevated to at least the height of the wheely bin. Hope this helps.
@@jasonb9652 There are lots of other humanure videos to answer questions about The details of the filling process. This video was about building this kind of system.
Wow thats very tempting, a wheelie bin compost dunny that costs maybe 100 bucks per year or a council approved aerated dunny with an annualised cost of about 1500.
Great topic!! Thanks for posting! But it is a compost bin not a toilet. 😁 Show us your toilet Geoff 🙏💩 And do you add greens? I use the Joe Jenkins way.
If you’re new to this and not elderly, disabled or in very cold climates... the simplest toilet is a tiny garden shed that isn’t tightly built, built on top of a platform made from pallets screwed to posts on concrete footings. Put this near your front door, ideally in a spot that won’t get sun all day in summer. Line the composting chamber with black poly, and mound up soil or gravel as a base to keep surface runoff away from seeping through the bottom of your heap. Better than sawdust is rotted wood duff, but this is harder to find.
Don’t pee on the heap unless necessary. If you only have to go number one, you need to use a separate (much simpler) toilet that goes to a large camper plastic bag, whatever one calls those things. Put this in the same outhouse.
I got to say that's not only humanure for me Since I started doing it, my physical, mental and spiritual health inproved a lot. I recovered from a very hard and difficult to cure disease. Because of this, I could start doing in my life and invent many new things that I could not before due to poor health and poor general condition. Beacause of this, I was able to start working a lot physically and intellectually. I also feel better spritually- happier and freer to do good and generally as me and I can also give this happiness to others. The very sad thing is that people do not want to see that the changes that have taken place are the results of working towards humanure.
It’s really great design! ….except it only works for bathrooms that are up off ground high enough to give clearance to put the bin underneath to catch the waste.
@@katesaffin4148 Try getting ahold of a copy of book, “Solviva” by Anna Eddy (sp?) She invented a multi-bucket potty that uses a big bin full of loose mulch & worms. As each bucket is filled with wastes+ cover material, it gets overturned onto the mulch + worms, & left there. By the time the last of maybe 10 buckets gets turned over onto the mulch, the 1st bucket has been nicely cleaned out by the worms. Worms abate the disease-causing bacteria that permitting agents worry so much about. If you used a wheelie bin as a worm compost container, you could actually adapt that to use for a flush-toilet, too….(also see Solviva’s 2nd system).
Thank you! Currently the only waste we produce in my house is my dogs & ours manure. I was looking for the next step, so im changing my bathroom to dry one, and i was thinking on putting a biodigestor, so probably im going to place this one, and the other 6months will gas them... Thank you for all the information
I suggest have another smaller pipe way going upwards, or a ''crossroad'' of the main pipe at the top. The smell would go out there also have proper ventilation. An better solution to this is one with a crank, soon as you are done, crank it so it mixes up with the compost material. Another old solution but effective if made properly. Look it up.
Love it, looks a lot easier to care for instead of a 5 gallon bucket. But... convince my local county to change the codes first so they don't make me tear it apart. Our society is all about "false Green"--they'd never allow natural poop to go where it's supposed to and cycle into the ground outside of expensive dug up septic leech systems. They're all talk and no real practical leadership-type action. We have a septic... but if it ever goes bad I'm in no hurry to fix it cause I know how to naturally deal with this stuff like nature does(and Geoff teaches). I'd just never be able to sell my home until I fixed our septic if it broke.
Without sounding disgusting or cruel, can you add compost worms? Living in the suburbs what would you do with the liquid, my neighbour is down hill from me, i wouldn't be asking if I didn't like him.
I was looking at a wormery site yesterday and they had wormeries for pet poo, so I assume yes? The important thing about humanure, though, is that pathogens can last for (or so I've read) about two years, so you shouldn't really use them before that, and it would just be safer in general not to use them around salads, where the bit you eat is in contact with the humanure. As for the urine, it would be better in the suburbs to separate urine from solids. Urine is clean and sterile when it's fresh, as long as you don't have a urine infection, but it quickly turns into a breeding ground for microbes if you don't use it quickly, be that on a compost heap or mixed with water as a fertiliser.
Yes, I just found this video where a guy is talking about combining a composting toilet with worms and with bokashi composting all in one system. No idea if it's a good system though, but it seems to work for him. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-L1H7Wb35isw.html
i have just started one like this an i use turkey nest instead of saw dust i am adding worms to help brake it down .i am hoping the nest materal will work better than saw dust as it is allready acataved no smale so fare
May I ask how you vent this kind of compost toilet? Also wondering how you keep the "delivery pipe" clean. Would be great if you had a link to the plans for this in greater detail. Is that possible. Many thanks!
People commonly repurpose 5 or 6 gallon buckets, bottoms cut out, as a drop-pipe. BUT…since this bin has a drain for liquids, he could technically just flush a regular toilet, & have the normal waste pipe feed into the top of the bin, or top side of the bin (referrence: “Solviva” book by Anna Eddy). As long as the compost media is loose enuf, to allow fluids fast-passage to the bottom drain, the solids, + worms, do the work at the top of the compost media pile. Fluids out the drain, can be routed right to the garden via a slotted or perforated drain pipe, under the surface (out of sight)-gardens love the extra nitrogen. At the Solviva farm, they actually built a double chamber compost box at least 8’ h. X 2’x4’, insulated well against cold winters, w/a divider down the middle. & they added worms to the top of the pile in the chambers. Their old, high-flush toilet waste pipe was rerouted to the 1st chamber. It worked great, even tho they had some weekend seminars with up to 30 (?) or so people using that toilet, it never had a problem. At 1 year, upon checking (thinking surely they’d need to swab sides), the 1st chamber was doing great, no need to swap chambers! But that toilet was in there upstairs. Bins & tall compost chambers don’t work as well if there’s only a low crawlspace, & of course, no way, if house is on-slab. One unit made in Africa, has an outside bin; waste lands on a big acme screw, which turns each time the toilet seat lid is opened or shut, carrying solids out to the exterior chamber, where worms compost it, & its lid gives access for cleaning out the compost. Worms can help that compost faster too. Worms abate the coliform bacteria Code officials worry about. I think this is the one-looking at the page, it’s the one on the left…waterless, picture shows a diagram of it. www.esan.co.za/off-grid-sanitation-solutions/
@@Chimonger1 Thank you for responding. I'm not having any luck finding the diagram of which you speak. Would you mind clarifying how I can find that on the link you've sent me? Many thanks!
I believe human waste is a valuable resource that should be used for this purpose. However, most amateurs are far too lax with safety precautions. My opinion as someone who has studied soil, composting and biochemistry.
Providing the slots are not obstructed and they're less than 24 inches apart, the half-pipes don't need pressurized air to work. However, a pulse of air every half hour will definitely speed up decomposition.
@@nathanpiatt5001 Out in the middle of the country you could get away with it. Our family campground property set up their own self-made septic with barrels and pipes. But if you ever want to sell your property or the county does get wind of it you're tearing it apart at your own cost. I hate regulatory bodies--I know they're there because people have done some stupid stuff they're protecting the public against but they're way too involved in many areas of the USA.
Is it not a problem that the "surplus liquid" is not just sterile urine, but urine that has gone through shit? What are the requirements for the gravel trench to make sure that the black water coming out of the system isn't unsafe?
Its gone through shit+several layers of compost and wood chips/sawdust with no solids coming through with all of the filtering. My understanding is that health wise and regulation wise its not much worse than a dirtier (i.e. kitchen) grey water system, meaning yea you'd want the reed bed or otherwise ensure that the water never comes up out over the surface of the gravel trench and instead just sinks down
im curing why you suggest directing the surplus liquid to a gravel trench or reed bed. cant you use it to fertilize trees/veg garden? if so, what dilution ratio should be used? same as urine?
That's the shizzzzzz! ;- ) and even the pizzzz! Seriously, that is cool, and so simple. But, you did not really show us the full process. The bin you showed us at the end did not have a hole in the top. How did it get there. Can you do a full video that includes the complete process? And you illustrate the "cleaning process". I like the idea that this can be in the room underneath the toilet. I've seen huge composting toilets at campgrounds and they did not smell at all. Currently my toilet has a leak and I am wasting water until I get it fixed, so this would be much cheaper and simpler.
I have 3 normal compost bins full of red worms compositing worms. Iv read that they don't like human waste so I decided to experiment. I put some of my own toilet waste in one of the bins and after a cupple weeks it was jam packed with worms. I suspect they like my waste because I have a diet high in fruit and veg and low in meat. The compost from that bin is for trees and shrubs only to be safe.
Interesting in deed. I’m not sure our society could get any more uptight and bacteria-phobic! We’re on 2 1/2 acres just outside the city and I’m beginning to think that we’re not far enough! I love this idea. When u have a family of 7 on a septic it makes you open up to older ways. Bring on the permaculture!!
Александр Костин after you are doing pooping or peeing I’d suggest pouring in a few cups of sawdust. You want to cover your poop with it so there’s no flies trying to get to it.
Does anybody know if tree/bark chippings would be ok. I fear all the saw dust from saw mills etc will be contaminated with rot preventing chemicals. Any thoughts?
How many bins do people use? I have six bins, live with my husband and four dogs and am constantly running out of space… been doing this for two years and had to transfer unfinished compost into big bags on the land… any help appreciated!
I can't understand - if you should keep the bin locked for 6 to 10 months - where you should store you waste in this period? It seems you should have more bins.
Yes, you'd need more bins. People using IBC containers for collection also have several of these. Human solid excrement is ca. 100 kg/(person×year), so minus drying and plus sawdust maybe 120 l. So get two such 250 l bins for every two people using the system. One to collect the waste, one to compost it.
What happens if the evacuation of the human processed food is explosive? If the thing gets on all the walls of the bin, will it disapear with the compost?
We are in process of building one that should make Mr. Lawton proud. Question, does sawdust have to be added after every solid use, or just put the 20L sawdust on the bottom as described in the video?
Having visited Zaytuna farm I can tell you that you need to add sawdust or whatever after each deposit. Basically if you don't cover what you did then it will smell.
And where do I go to the loo for 6-10 months after it is "locked down"? It means building a whole stack of these things? Doesn´t make a lot of sense to me.
I am wondering, is it fine to dig a hole and make the humanure in there? On a property, a designated place for this purpose. It's my dream to build that for myself in a sustainable home, in the future. I imagine in a deep hole manure and food waste will still become into a fertilizer, with time.
If you strictly keep urine and feces apart then probably yes.. But if the feces are in a hole in the soil and it rains bacteria can wash down into the groundwater and end up in peoples drinking water. So: if you live in a very dry place where people dont drink the groundwater yes you can do that if you put the urine in a seperate place. It is kind of important though to have the feces sit in a closed bucket for a few months so the content heats up in the sun and the bacteria die. Be careful and good luck
Hi there, I live in a place that unfortunately is forbidden because the neighbors made and gave a lot of flys. Whether it's on the covered part of my backyard or inside the house, is there any way to compose my poop in a closed/sealed box? What would you have to do? Put extra bacterias? Put a humidifier in it? - A oxygenator? Helppp God bless u guys ❤️🙏🏼
Lol just thinking how to explain it made me laugh. Visualize your ass seen from inside the bin. connect a tube between the 2 and a seat. Gravity should do the rest. If you don't like smells put a side tube on the main tube with a fan. You kinda need a height difference for this system to work. So with a wheelie bin you'd need at least 3.5 to 4 m for it to be comfortable From you anus to bottom would be around 2 m and then you need headspace.
What do the pipes (half pipes) in the corners do? I see that they help with air and ventilation but they are under the lid, so is there air in the pipes but not much air flow? How does this help? Does it help air get down under the level the bin is filled to? I guess you're adding wood chips every time you make a deposit?
I made some research. They permit all the gases to get up the delivery pipe, and you have a chimney with a ventilator just above the pipe. Like this you catch the gases before they escape the toilet. The chimney is on the toilet, above the pipe.
Im thinking of making this for our ne toilet area, i am having trouble finding the pipe that goes from the actual seat to the bin, can anyone help me with this. tia.
This is the video I relied on to start making humanure, but two years later, I’ve got a big issue. The bins just aren’t composting and the taps are clogged so I can’t get rid of all the liquid. We are a family of two adults and 4 dogs but only put a bit of their poo from the patio, when they poo on the land, I don’t pick it up. We have six wheelie bins, and I’m at a point where I’ve had to transfer unfinished poo compost into big white bags because I need to make space for new poop coming in. Any suggestions? Anybody else have sissies and are stuck in a really bad position now? We have no more space for more bins and it seems silly to do that anyways since I’m trying to make this work, not end up with 100 bins on my land with nothing composting ever… any help appreciated!
If you had a urine diverter type of seat with a pipe to a bucket, or peed in a different bucket it would be even better. And the urine can be used elsewhere.
I am in EE mountains. I am building a small raised bed that I will fill with fall leaves and will dump paper urine and poo there then cover by fall leaves. Same goes for the bucket I use. Put fall leaves every time you use it! My dump site is in the woods so more leaves will cover the humanure in the fall in 3 years after I will fertilize the trees behind my house with the finished compost! Simple quick and no brainer
Svetla Nikolova I was thinking of using a 5 gallon bucket instead but was hoping to use the bigger cart so i only have to deal with it twice a year. With temps down to -40F I like to avoid an outhouse. One way or another, I’ll want a urinal for boys and a Urin separator for the girls. Urin is instant use fertilizer and I don’t want it mixed with the poo part.
@@4philipp one person and his family had 25 5 gal buckets filled! If you are one person that will be sufficient to to go through the winter without going too far. Just make sure you have lids for all of them. Here in EE is not too cold in the winter and we go out daily to dump them In the outhouse hole
@@4philipp How do boys shit without urinating? Or do you let out the first blast of urine in the urinal first and dance across to the shitter after to let the number 2 out?
That's just the repository the toilet is above indoors. Basically a box with a toilet seat on top. The big pipe connects to the toilet outlet gravity driven. He was building the composting end.
Well, Joe Jenkins, author of Humanure Handbook, recomends the use of bucket toilets that from time to time are discarded in larger compost bins enveloped with a thick layer (25cm to 30cm, 10 inches to a foot) of hay or straw. The idea is to compost the human excrements via thermophilic process (if that makes sense) and says that, in a compost bin that is able to retain temperatures over 55 degrees celcius, it needs only a week or so to kill all or the majority of the pathogens. In a bin that don't use thermophilic process, it will take something around 2 years to eliminate the pathogens. So, my question is: do you agree with him? Can we safely use your (or his) method to build soil in a garden?
Geoff uses this only under tree crops and stuff that wont touch it, stuff that generally wont get harvested for a couple weeks after application anyway. This process, interestingly enough, is in line with EPA regulations in the US. IF you wanted to make this totally safe for all crops, you would do it like he does for maybe 6 months, then dump it into a at least 4X4 ft cube covered with some more carbon material and either let it sit for about another year or make absolute sure the whole thing gets to temperature for over a week like Joe Jenkins does. That's probably the best balance between full versatile use, safety, and minimal handling of buckets and poop.
Why does this method work without a separate compost pile? I know it doesn't work inside 5-gallon buckets because there isn't enough mass to create the heat necessary to destroy the pathogens. How much mass do you need for hot composting to happen? And how does the plastic of the wheelie bin handle that heat?
This would be considered slow composting as you adding mass slowly to it and then letting it break down over about 10 months. So it wouldn't generate much heat. The initial chips just help kick start the system
The half pipes in the corners of the bin, do they need ambient air flow, forced air flow, or is static air pocket sufficient to induce good composting?
Providing the slots are not obstructed and they're less than 24 inches apart, the half-pipes don't need pressurized air to work. However, a pulse of air every half hour will definitely speed up decomposition.
it looks like the white has a hole while in place and filling, the original lid will be flipped out of the way. After full, you would move to allow to sit and 'compost' for the timeframe mentioned, months - during that time, the white lid would affix to the next wheelie bin and the filled one would just close the original lid.
I live in a mobile home and have built a urinal separator myself with a 5 liter (small) bucket at the back, I use a decomposing plastic bag with sawdust and tie a knot and throw it out after every toilet visit, now I have bought a small house in the country and would like to use the same system, but I would like to compost my small bags in possibly down some small bags of kitchen waste would that work in your opinion?or would the mixture be too dry? I could possibly lead the urine down into the same bucket via a separate pipe system. even if it sounds silly. but I think that the bags will be dumped in a waste shaft with a 12v ventilation installed and the urinary system will be fitted with a valve. I expect it will be both odor-free and easy to clean
