The Scoop on Poop//EP 11 Nature's Head VS C-Head Composting Toilet in a van or in an Off-Grid Home

[Music] so [Music] do [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] today we're going to give you the brutally honest scoop on poop yeah today we're going to compare the boon john made by sea head composting toilet that we use here in our off-grid home and we're going to compare that to the nature's head composting toilet that we have in the van we're going to be very honest with you and we're going to tell you things that people normally don't talk about when they're doing their van tours and telling you about their beautiful wonderful composting toilet right one thing we hear about composting toilets all the time is that they smell so stay to the very end of the video because we're going to tell you what we've discovered over 10 years of using a composting toilet the single most important thing you can do to keep your toilet from smelling welcome to clarity off grid we're matt and christina we live off the grid in our self-sustaining home in the mountains of colorado and when we aren't working on projects here at home we're traveling in our ram promaster van that matt converted into a sweet home on wheels for us and our two dogs jesse and lilly bell join us as we share living off the grid during the cold and snowy winter months and traveling to new and exciting places leave us a comment introduce yourself or just say hi we'd love to know what kind of information you'd like about off-grid living and traveling if you like this video make sure you let us know by clicking the like button and if you haven't already make sure you subscribe to our channel by clicking the red subscribe button and ringing the bell to make sure you get notified when we upload new videos [Music] welcome to the throne room in our off-grid home and this is our boon john sea head composting toilet so as you can see this toilet is pretty compact it was designed by a boat maker in florida and his company is called sea head this toilet was originally designed to be used on a boat and now a lot of people use them in their rvs in their tiny homes and we've chosen this toilet in our off-grid home it has a typical toilet seat on it which is really nice it has this little chamber pot lid that you lift when you use it so you remove the chamber pot lid and it stows neatly in the back of the toilet seat and then for all composting toilets that we've ever used you want to make sure that whether you're a man or a woman you sit down on the toilet to do your number one and your number two so guys you're just gonna have to get over it all good composting toilets have one main thing in common and that is they separate the liquids from the solids well let me tell you a story about having a toilet that doesn't do that when i decided to build twisted oak i made a conscious decision that i wanted to use a composting toilet and we have no other septic system in the house and the composting toilet of the day was a toilet that shall remain nameless but it combined both the liquids and the solids in a large drum and then you rotated that drum it was super complicated it was impossible to clean and what eventually happened over a short period of time after using it was the drum would fill up with basically sludge and i would have to empty that toilet which was really complicated about every week i would wait till the kids would go to school because they'd be so disgusted by the smell and i'd light incense and put it all over the house and then i would get out my big purple poopy bucket and i would literally clean out that toilet and sometimes i had to use it even a wet shop vac which was we won't go into those details and this went on for years and i was so committed to using a composting toilet that i just put up with it but then when i got the boon john it was absolutely life changing we now have the separation of the liquids in the solids we have no smell it's super easy to empty it even if we empty it every third day or so and it has made life a dream so when you're sitting down the solids naturally go to the back and the liquids go to the front so they're separated solids fall into a bucket in the back and that bucket is filled with a medium we currently use some wood shavings that we get from the co-op liquids naturally flow to the front and they're collected in a one gallon bottle for this toilet then when you're done with your business you put the little chamber pot lid back on the toilet you close the lid and you take the handle that we have stored in the basket and you insert it in this hole and you turn that crank about a dozen times and what that does is it covers up the solids and that keeps them from smelling there are two ways that the boone john handles liquid collection one you can collect it in a one gallon bottle and then you have to empty that if there's two people using it probably every day the other thing you can do is get a urine diverter and that's what this is and we ended up ordering this what this allows you to do is the urine goes into here and then there's a tube attached to here and it flows outside and you can divert that out to like a gray water garden or a septic line what we have found is over time these small tubes get gucked up with scale and then when they stop draining properly the p can back up so when the p backs up and it overflows it overflows into the box of the boon john and it's really a mess and really disgusting to clean up we've just gone back to the old fashioned simple way of collecting it in a one gallon jug and then emptying it every day [Music] while we're out here i just want to take a few minutes to talk about the importance of the proper composting system so if you're going to incorporate a composting toilet into your home before you even pick out your toilet you need to figure out a composting system what's really important is to have a bin where you collect about a year's worth of waste because you're going to want to let that waste compost for at least a year so what we have here is we have this is the current bin where we're putting all of our waste and we'll fill this bin up and then we'll cover it and we will let it rest for a year and back here we have a bin that we collected waste in for well over a year maybe even two years and it is currently composting and we're just letting it rest i didn't really understand this this well when i built my home and i had read things about in composting toilet reviews where they said oh you just take the waste and you sprinkle it under trees believe me you do not want to take waste right out of a composting toilet and sprinkle it on your property anywhere you need to have it safe and controlled so that animals your own dogs wild animals don't get into it most of the time when i empty the bucket i take it over and i hose it out and i rinse it out women's anatomy sometimes makes it difficult to in this toilet to really keep all of the liquids separated from the solids and sometimes some of the liquids get into the solids bin what makes it kind of slimy so in that case i usually give it a good rinse out and even let it sit in the sun for a while every time i empty the boone john i just like to give it a quick wipe down super easy to clean so it's easy to do and that's another way of keeping smells down what i use is for all my cleaning i use water with a little bit of vinegar and some tea tree oil or even a little bit of lavender the thing when you're cleaning a composting toilet is you don't want to put that into the solids bin because that can deter composting so we told you we'd give you the down and dirty on this and this is one thing that happens when you collect your urine in a bottle is that it does start to get scale on the inside and it's pretty skanky so we'll use a bottle for a couple of weeks or until it gets really dirty and then we'll just throw it away and put in a fresh bottle so one of the other nice things about this toilet is it has this cut out observation spot so that you can see how much urine you have collected in that bottle so you want to keep an eye on that line and make sure you change out the bottle or you empty the urine bottle before it overflows because it will overflow into the bin and if you're if you're like me and you have to get up and pee three or four times a night you want to make sure before you go to bed that that thing has enough room in it to last all night sometimes with small children or with women if you get too far forward on the toilet you can get some solids into the liquid area and that's probably one of the worst things that can happen because some of those solids can get down in that really small hole and you have to clean that out so if you're just emptying into a gallon bottle like we do now it's not so critical but if you're using the diverter and you have tubing that goes out to a garden and some of that gets stuck in that tubing so you can have a real problem with backup and then you have to clean out that entire line the nature's head composting toilet in the van the way we designed this was so that the toilet cabinet is tucked away nicely underneath our closet and we can open it up here so that all we have to do is basically close the door we have the privacy we need even in a parking lot or something we have the seat right in front of us so nobody can see in to see what we're doing and there's our toilet just like the boone john this toilet is designed so that the solids go in the back and the liquids go in the front it's got a pretty nice design here so that you open this up to get to the solids bin and then you can close it so if you're doing both you can sit down you can pee when you have the urge you can open it up do your number two and close it up it works very well the seat is built in the toilet seat is actually built in to here so you don't have a separate seat that you have to deal with and then the hinge goes right on top everything is self-contained the p bucket is right here that p bucket holds about two gallons so with two of us using it we only have to empty it about every uh two to three days which is kind of nice not to have to empty it every day so once you do your number two you're going to have to agitate the medium just like you do in the boon john and the way that's done in the nature's head is by this handle on the side and we've found that it works pretty well you can actually use that handle and do it by hand when you've just changed the medium but after after a week or two it starts to get a little harder and you have to use your feet to do it and this handle you can't do that very easily with bare feet because it hurts so we basically have to put our shoes on in order to turn the crank handle in this toilet also after you use the toilet you can spritz it out with a little water and clean it up if you leave any skid marks you got to clean it up with a piece of tissue and just drop that into the compost medium we do use toilet paper and we drop it right into the compost medium in both of our toilets to empty the pea bottle you actually have to lift the toilet bowl on this toilet and you do that by disconnecting these latches these two latches so you just lift and pull the urine bucket out so you empty it and then you put it back in so it basically takes three hands to do it in our van because there's not enough room here for me to lift this and open it all the way to just drop the handle in so i have to kind of squeeze it in there and if there's nobody around i have to use my knee to actually get it in so in order to clean this i first need to disconnect the vent and the vent power i need to unscrew the anchors that anchor it down and then i need to lift the whole thing out so it is helpful to do that after the p buckets been emptied because it'll be much lighter to empty the toilet i just open these two latches there's one on that side one on this side and then i can lift out of the way and it has to lift about two to three inches and then it's got a a hinge that just slides off of there so as you can see this is a little bulky but and you can see the medium in here i'm not going to change it because i've just changed it but you can see it's nice and loamy and even after two to three weeks we noticed that there was really no smell and it really was quite easy to deal with and to empty so one thing i really like about this toilet is it also comes with a lid and you can put that lid on here and empty it later so if you actually are in a place where you don't feel comfortable emptying your pea bucket you can have you can get a second pea bucket and then you can just store this one and empty them when you're ready if you buy one gallon jugs with screw-on lids for your boone john you can also do that that way with the boon john because we empty it about every two to three days it doesn't have any time to compost in the toilet so it does all of its composting in the composting bins outside but in this toilet we've actually gone three weeks before we've had to change it and the volume doubled in there but the consistency didn't change very much and it did not smell hardly at all it smells very earthy when you're changing it and all you have to do is take a plastic bag dump it into the plastic bag and empty it into a dumpster it's totally legal and totally safe to do that with these handles when everything is put together there's a ledge back here it's not really handled but there is a handle and there's a handle here so it's not too bad to carry it this way but when it's full it's quite heavy when you want to empty it there's not a handle on the front and there's not a handle on the back of the toilet bowl so when you open it up and remove the toilet bowl it's just very awkward to do you kind of have to hold on to these latches or hold on over here somewhere pull this off set it out of the way take this out and then when you empty it the only handle you have is this ledge and here and it's doable but it would be nice if they would put a little more thought into providing some other means of handling this when it's full and you need to empty it especially the toilet bowl [Music] then you have the same issue putting it together you just have to find something to grab onto while you put it back together um even just a handle up front somewhere would make it so much easier to manage so there's also no indentation on the bottom of the p bucket either so when you want to empty it you pretty much have to reach all the way under it grab it and empty it okay we thought we would reiterate the likes and dislikes of each of those toilets yeah and we have some different likes and dislikes between the two of us definitely on everything no just kidding so the things i like about the boone john is it's small it looks like a regular toilet as far as when you sit on it it uses a regular toilet seat it's also easy to clean and it's also easy to empty it and change it out which we have to do fairly frequently so that's good yeah and what i don't like about the boon john is that we have to empty it more often that we haven't really figured out the right medium yet to make it compost we're having issues with the compost we can't get a thermophilic compost happening and we think it's because those wood shavings that we're using must have pine or something in them that is uh compost resistant and we've talked about using the coco coir because we've had such great results with it in the nature's head but when you're emptying out a toilet every three days and you would have to go through the whole process of softening that cocoa and preparing it it's a bit of a process all in itself and if you had to do that every three days that would be really challenging plus the amount of coco coir that you need to put in there you would have to it would cost about five dollars every two three every three days which that'll add up that's pretty that's kind of prohibitive it's totally different to spend five dollars over three weeks right okay the other thing that i dislike about the boone john is the toilet seat has a cutout in the back of the toilet seat uh where the crank goes down into it and quite frankly that hurts when i sit on it and as for a woman you kind of have to adjust your position on the toilet in order to you know get the solids going the right direction and the liquids going the right direction and the other thing i've heard from my sons i don't even know if we want to talk about this it's kind of a small area yeah it's not a very deep um urine collector so for men to sit on that i've just heard antidotally that it might not be all that comfortable is that probably sad yeah another point i want to make about the boon john is that it's designed not to use electricity and so there is no vent on it and it works fairly well that way but if you do put it in a van i think you would want to incorporate some sort of venting system uh like similar to the nature's head to make it yeah you'd have to yeah you'd have to get yourself a little vent uh and route it out and then down through the bottom of the van somewhere so that you can vent the smell away because it does smell some and and don't let them tell you that the nature's head doesn't smell at all because it does a little bit if you didn't have that vent in there it would you'd be able to smell it in your pan yeah but with a coco coir it definitely is much less smelly than the boon john can be in my opinion yeah i would tend to disagree with that i don't find that either one of them smells very bad at all i mean more less so than actually a conventional toilet in my opinion the odor that you get from a composting toilet is more of an earthy smell it's not a fecal smell that you might get in a conventional bathroom yeah that's true i agree with that one more thing about the boon john is if you wanted to use it in a van they now have a what they call a p tank and so you can get a tank that installs in that inside the toilet where it will help keep any kind of sloppage from the liquids bucket getting into the box so if you're moving in an rv or in a boat you want to get that p tank the nature's head i really like the design it's very easy to use it's nice to have that latch right behind you when you're using it you can urinate as you need to and when you need to do the number two you just open the flap and then you can close it right away and keep venting what little fecal smell there is when you are in a uh 60 square foot space with another person doing that it's really nice to be able to just close that up and have it vent out right and i would say on that order um i really had a hard time getting used to the toilet seat in the nature's head it's not really a seat it's just a rim so it's kind of like sitting on a big bowl which was awkward for me i mean i think yeah it's not too much yeah it's not super comfortable but you know i manage and i and it's okay and it doesn't hurt it doesn't hurt it's just not all that comfortable yeah and the other thing i have to say is the hole for the solids is fairly small so sometimes you have to clean up a skid mark true definitely more often than in the boon jump yeah and the other thing about the nature's head is as nice as it is it is just a big hunk of plastic so those of us who are kind of concerned about all the plastic in the world it is just a big huge chunk of plastic um that said it's not one use plastic and i think it'll last a long time yeah yeah and it's it can become it's very cumbersome to have to change it a lot so if you're using it in a how if you were to use it in a household where there might be four people and changing that out every week it might be a little bit um challenging yeah with the handle situation on it um it's pretty bulky and awkward if your hands are dry it's hard to hold that bowl i've found it to be pretty awkward it really kind of takes two people it's much easier if you have two people to manage that toilet yeah sometimes yeah and and definitely emptying it into a garbage bag um is a challenge for one person because you got to try and get the garbage bag up over the top and dump it over and it's helpful to have two people do that yeah for sure the crank mechanism is a challenge to use when it starts to get very full in the nature's head um you got to have shoes on basically and it takes some even then once it starts to get full it takes full force to get that spindle to turn yeah i was going to be nicer about it but it does it takes quite a bit of force i just want to especially reiterate the venting in the van with the nature's head is really very nice to have it vents outside and because it's so loamy in there and so earthy even when you are outside and you can smell it it's not really an offensive smell so the one thing i was really resistant to and i built off grid was having any kind of fan running full time i didn't want the noise and i was worried it would drain down my solar system what we found on the van is you hardly can hear the fan running on the nature's head it's so quiet and because it's in that cabinet maybe even more so and it doesn't seem to be drawing enough electricity that it's really a problem it's not an issue yeah so if you do want to incorporate one into an off-grid home make sure you wire it properly so that you can have electricity running to it so that you can vent it and have a way to vent it outside yeah i agree with that yeah we'll include a link to both of these toilets and their accessories in the description down below and now because you've made it all the way to the end of this video i'm going to share with you what i've discovered to be the number one way to eliminate odors in a composting toilet and that is simply to eat a whole food healthy diet so we're going to wrap up this video here we hope this has been helpful to you we hope we've been frank and brutally honest about our experience with composting toilets this is the kind of information i wish i had had years ago when i was learning about composting toilets so if you have any questions at all please leave them in the comments we would be happy to answer them as frankly and honestly as we can i spell out my whole journey of learning about composting toilets in my book in a chapter called the scoop on poop so if you're interested in that book i'll leave a link in the description down below this is really hard to talk about [Music] you

Channel: Clarity Off-Grid

Views: 62,064

Rating: 4.957952 out of 5

Keywords: using the C-Head Composting Toilet, boon jon vs nature's head, using the nature's head, composting toilets how do they work, cleaning the nature's head, nature's head in an off-grid home, cleaning the c-head, likes and dislike of the nature's head, likes and dislike of the c-head, c-head vs natures head, using the boon jon, c-head in an off-grid home, ProMaster Van Conversion 136, van life build, living in the mountains off grid, off-grid retirement

Id: -UbdZT-R8rM

Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021