Looking into composting toilet

[OutOfControl]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Everyone's a comedian .

Well considering the Joke Thread has descended into a discussion of tools, their official name, and if ones wife knows what it looks like and how to use it, some one had to lighten up the mood.

[cr180]

And in case anyone is looking at buying a composting head very soon…….I just noticed someone posted a new, in the box C-Head for sale today. Appears to be a good price.

[Manateeman]

One can learn a lot from manatees which might prove helpful in the operation of your “composting head”
You diet and oxygen. Manatee “biscuits” float and are pretty much odor free. This is the result of their diet which is almost pure vegetable based and a long digestive track. Off gasses are rather pungent. They are not ruminate animals like cows nor hind gut fermenters like horses. People think cows live on grass, but their protein source is microbial. The cows live off the microbes inside them and the cows help the microbes by chewing again and again. Manatees have a conveyor of teeth replacement because their teeth wear out fast.
How can this help us with composting heads?
The “bad” odors come from anaerobic microbial populations. It’s the aerobic bugs you need to keep happy. The simplest way is adding oxygen. This is done in composting by turning over the pile but direct air injection will work. Take a lot of smelly air, pump it through something like slightly moist peat moss and you have a Bio-Filter. Works well unless you drown the bugs with too much water Or...coat them with oil. So a diet high in oils can inhibit good guy microbial growth. There are products from protein breakdowns which change the kinds of microbes and certain drugs as well but too much water, or oil generally causes the compost to die. Don’t dump chemicals, oils or anything that can cause a shift in the acid / base of the compost. Toilet paper isn’t pure laboratory paper. I don’t know why compost heads do not have air injection at the bottom. Probably cost and complexity. Anyway. Whatever you eat, try to think about keeping your bugs happy. They take time to grow and they like warmth. Cleaning out and sanitizing everything and beginning with all new compost material and then adding your stuff all at once? Not going to work. SMJ has a new substrate which might be a step forward. It might have a better surface to volume ratio. You are feeding a living microbial colony. Observe temperature, off gas odors and moisture levels. It’s a learning curve. Remember, urine is Uric Acid. You don’t want to kill your microbes by shifting the acid/ base ratio or dropping antibiotics on them or detergents or chlorine, or salt..etc. Any shift in offgas odor is a sign of trouble.
Eating like a manatee...lots of veggies... is also good for your health.
Happy “Biscuits “.
Mark and the crew.

[smj]

To say the off gases of a manatee are rather pungent is a huge understatement!

[smj]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Yeah... but you got me excited . I wonder how it would work in my Nature's Head. I usually go a month between dumps using coir. Maybe with this stuff I could stretch it even longer.

A quick update Mike.
As I’ve said before, after about 1 week of a quart of Aspen bedding and a quart of coconut coir the head gets hard to turn and starts getting slightly moist.
With a quart of aspen bedding and a quart of the corn litter it’s been 2 weeks and still easy to churn and dry.
A success for us but unsure what the results would be with the Natures Head.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by smj

A quick update Mike.
As I’ve said before, after about 1 week of a quart of Aspen bedding and a quart of coconut coir the head gets hard to turn and starts getting slightly moist.
With a quart of aspen bedding and a quart of the corn litter it’s been 2 weeks and still easy to churn and dry.
A success for us but unsure what the results would be with the Natures Head.

Cool. That sounds very promising. I'm going to give it a try when I get back to my boat -- next Spring .

But wow... if I could double my time between needing to empty the tank, that would be awesome. I already go about a month.