The BEST TOILET For Van Life??? Hint: not composting

what is up y'all 7-0 savage here coming at you today with a very exciting video today we are going to be installing one of the most controversial topics in this van build and that is the toilet i believe we have found the best van life toilet in existence we're gonna go over a complete install of the toilet and then show you guys how it actually works if you are new to the channel we have been converting this sprinter van right here in order to survive the zombie apocalypse it is the ultimate off-road camper van with all of the features you could possibly want it has a full 10 kilowatt hour battery system a battery powered air conditioner massive off-road lights tires four-wheel drive all that good stuff if you are interested in watching this van build progress and watching me travel on this thing slap that subscribe button below now let's go ahead and dive right in so this is what our van currently looks like on the inside we finished most of the cabinets in here and we actually just finished installing this bathroom we actually just released an entire video on how we built it and installed it but to provide some reference in this video i am 6'5 and this shower enclosure is 24 by 36 inches there is a decent amount of room in here i have to say i'm pretty impressed that a shower this size can fit in the back of a cargo van and this right here is the toilet that we are putting inside this van this is a separate tiny toilet it is actually a brand new model they just released this a few months ago you're gonna need a couple of things to make this toilet work the first thing that you're gonna need is a hole somewhere to vent the air out of the toilet that's a very important component of this toilet we basically had a stainless steel tube that was welded to the bottom of our shower pan thing number two that you need for this toilet is a hole that we are going to drill here for an electrical connection as you need to power that fan that's blowing out of the van and that is it those are the only two prerequisites that you need wherever you're gonna mount this toilet everything else in this toilet is completely self-contained all right we got our wire pass through here i just put a little rubber grommet on it one of this just plugs straight in to the side of the toilet here and then the other end of the wire is connected to our 12 volt fuse box i made two entire videos on the electrical system in this van it's basically an entire documentary i think each one of the videos is about 40 minutes long if you're interested in more details on how to hook the electrical side up as far as the vent pipe all i had to do was use the included fitting in the toilet attach it to some pvc and then chop the end off of a pvc elbow so that it would fit flush with the floor cool thing about the air output vent is it barely shows at all on the side of the toilet there you can also go straight down out through the ground if your floor allows i have to go to a special place and then underneath the van i have that stainless steel tube that comes through the floor here you can see how hard it was to find a good place to get that drilled through it goes from the pvc fitting to this little piece that comes with the toilet this is a critter protector so that critters don't crawl in but it allows air out and prevents water from getting in as well we added a little bit of caulk on the outside perimeter of this pipe as for mounting the toilet there are a couple of pre-drilled mounting holes in the back and there is also one in the bottom i'm only going to use the ones in the back because i don't want to drill a hole in my shower pan i'm just using a number 12 stainless steel screw with a rubber washer on it as well as a metal washer so that wraps it up for the entire install for this toilet it is very simple to install this thing now i want to get into how this particular toilet works how it compares to other popular styles of toilets and van life and why i think it is the best toilet you could possibly get in a van so to kick things off let's go over the most popular types of toilets that exist in van life there are really only two super popular types and then there's one runner-up the traditional van or rv toilet that is probably still the most popular is the black tank slash cartridge slash cassette toilet and it works very similar to a house toilet where when you use it you press a flush button that runs water through the toilet and flushes it all into that holding tank the biggest problem with cassette and black tank toilets is that you have sewage the sewage smells terrible it's probably one of the most atrocious smells you can imagine and you can only legally dump sewage at sewage dumping stations or black water tank dumping stations the combination of the relatively hard to find blackwater dumping stations with the terrible smelly experience of dumping black water leads most people who have cassette or black water toilets to not really like them very much and that brings us to the second most popular type of toilet which is the composting toilet the composting toilet diverts urine and solids into their own separate spaces and it allows the solids side to compost you mix the solid side with some sort of organic material such as a peat moss and the idea is that over time that solids container actually composts it does not smell nearly as bad as something like real sewage and then when the solids container fills up you can empty that on its own the urine container can be poured out every two to three days and you don't need any sort of water connected to the toilet for it to work the two most popular composting toilets are the airhead toilet and the nature's head toilet in general people who use composting toilets like them the biggest problem in my opinion is you have to hand scoop the solids container out whenever you decide to empty it now the third option that's not super popular but i want to mention it because i used this in my last van is what's called a dry flush toilet the dry flush toilet is kind of like a diaper genie if you've ever seen one how it works is you do your business into the toilet you press the flush button and then the toilet wraps the bag around a few times effectively twists off whatever business you just did and then exposes a brand new section of the same bag that you can use a second or third time each cartridge or bag can be used about 12 times before you have to throw the whole thing away the really nice thing about the dry flush toilet is the convenience so when you have used that bag 12 times all you have to do is pick it up and throw it in a trash can somewhere it's definitely wasteful and not as good for the environment the big downside to dry flush toilets is that you can't really use them for number ones because you don't want to flush after every single time you do a number one that's just not economically feasible so when i had my dry flush toilet i used it for number twos only and it worked great for that and then for number ones i would literally just carry around a gatorade bottle og van lifestyle works pretty well if you're a guy i'm not sure how well that would work if you're a girl i mean guessing you're gonna have to have pretty good accuracy if you could call it that those are the top three that people use for van life right now there are tons of other off-grid style toilets things like incinerating toilets literally light your poop on fire there's macerating toilets there's freezing toilets none of those are really feasible in vans because they take way too much power and that brings us to the separate waterless toilet of all those toilets this is very similar to a composting toilet so first off just take a look at how nice this thing looks i mean this is definitely one of the best looking toilets never thought i'd come to a point in my life where i call a toilet good looking damn girl so when you open the lid on this toilet it is pretty simple this part is actually exactly the same as a composting toilet where it diverts the urine and the solids one of the really cool engineering aspects of this toilet is that when you sit on it it actually opens the solids container now you can't really do it with your hand because you need the pressure of like a whole human being sitting there but when you do sit on it the whole thing opens by the way this toilet is not in use and it is super clean so don't be too freaked out that i'm actually touching it now let's go ahead and take a look at the innards and we can see a little bit more as to how this thing works this right here is our urine jug which simply lifts out like this when you pull the urine jug out of the toilet just like this you have two different caps you have the one that caps off where the urine enters while you're using the toilet and then you have the cap that you unscrew when you actually want to dump this container out so a common theme with this toilet is that the engineering behind it is actually really really impressive there are really convenient features built into this such as the cap storage that cap can be stored there and this cap can be stored here so you never lose track of your caps i'm pretty sure the reason there's two openings is because this one's kind of an anti-splash version makes it so that when you're driving this stuff doesn't splash out that's why they have the second opening here for when you're actually pouring this thing out so after you poured out your urine container you can simply drop it back into the toilet one last thing about the liquids container which is actually a huge problem with the other urine diverting toilets on the market as you can see that separate logo on the back there is glowing red currently which means that the urine container needs to be emptied soon they say you can use it one or two more times after that red light comes up the great part about that is you're not going to over use the urine container and have it overflow into the toilet and that pretty much sums up how the liquid side works if you guys watch cara and nate's channel which i absolutely love they are currently traveling around in a van and one of their biggest complaints about their toilet is they have overflowed the urine side which is apparently not a pleasant job to clean up big time messed up oh i need your help okay put the camera down i need your help so that brings us to the solid side of the toilet which is the entire back half here now we have the magic auto opening lid which simply lifts up makes a really scary noise every time you do that it holds itself in place exposing the solids container here let's go ahead and pull this out [Music] now the solids container here is where we start to differ from the composting toilet so the composting toilets you will fill the solids container with an organic material and then use some sort of lever on the side to twist up your solids with that organic material so that the composting happens whereas this solid container does not have any organic material it does have this little moisture absorber pad that you can put in there but there is no composting action in this toilet at all actually messaged separate about this and asked them and the response was super interesting so when you're in a van and you're using your toilet where the solids container needs to be emptied every month or so that's actually not enough time for the composting of the solids to happen at all which effectively makes adding that organic material to your toilet a waste of space so the idea here is you get all of that space back and most importantly in my opinion you can see that there is indeed a bag around the solids container we take this little trim piece off these ones actually come from separate but you could use any trash bag which means when you filled this thing up you do not have to pull out your trowel and hand travel your feces from the last month you can just pull this bag out and either throw it away or put it into the composting pile these bags from separate are actually compostable and then after you've dealt with that used trash bag full of solids you can just plop this guy back down which seals around the outside of the top of the solids container and then you can see this port on the left-hand side of the solids container here that is actually the fan port which directly sucks all of the air from the solids container and diverts it outside of the van composting toilets have that as well this method of having an exhaust fan for the smell of the solids container works ridiculously well there is no smell whatsoever left in your bathroom after you've used it i mean i'm sure if you did something nasty like put your nose right up to that exhaust after it was used you'd probably get a whiff but it is way less smelly than you'd think by the way this is the little mechanism here that turns when you sit down and put pressure on these ball bearings i just think that is so cool but i am an engineer after all so nerding out over something like a toilet is not that far from expected you can see that we have our toilet inside of our wet bath directly underneath our shower and that is totally fine this thing is totally waterproof and that actually sums up the entire functionality of this toilet as far as closing thoughts here i'm gonna nerd out on you guys a little bit but in general one aspect of innovation is just iterating on top of an already good design in my opinion the composting toilet is that already pretty good design and this is simply an iteration on top of that i think with this toilet you get all of the benefits of a composting toilet and you mitigate some of those detractors but i am obviously not the only person in van life and i'm very curious to hear if you guys also think that this is the best van life toilet believe it or not i still do read every single comment that's posted to this channel i hope that you guys enjoyed this video and that it gave you a good comprehensive overview of van life toilet if you did and you're interested in this type of content please slap that subscribe button below we just hit 40k subscribers and let me tell you guys we are just getting started if you like this particular video slap the like button below it helps the algorithm push this video out to more users who can also learn from it thank you all so much for watching and i will see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Seven O Savage

Views: 601,390

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Id: Aae3XE4IsY8

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021