How Do You Improve Loveable Loo Use in an RV?

Welcome to permies! What suggestions can you offer for loveable lou's but with a urine divert and in an RV. What can you suggest for disposing of the wood chips if you do not own land to compost on?

Gail Jardin wrote:Welcome to permies! What suggestions can you offer for loveable lou's but with a urine divert and in an RV. What can you suggest for disposing of the wood chips if you do not own land to compost on?

The Loveable Loo is a compost toilet and requires a compost bin. There is no disposal. A urine diverting system would be for a dry toilet, not a compost toilet and not for a Loveable Loo.

Joe Jenkins

Joe Jenkins wrote:

Gail Jardin wrote:Welcome to permies! What suggestions can you offer for loveable lou's but with a urine divert and in an RV. What can you suggest for disposing of the wood chips if you do not own land to compost on?

The Loveable Loo is a compost toilet and requires a compost bin. There is no disposal. A urine diverting system would be for a dry toilet, not a compost toilet and not for a Loveable Loo.

Joe Jenkins

Hmm, most folks that DIY their toilet with a urine diverter use sawdust and call it a composting toilet, some even have houses they return to with compost piles that they dump in. Most don't and that is where my concern is.  When we lived on a small farm we just used the bucket system and composted it all. It worked great aside from when it was so cold the outer layer of urine would freeze to the side of the bucket on the hike to the compost pile. I guess for now I'll stick to black water tanks and possibly set up a lagoon once I have land. What is your take on lagoons as part of an aquaponics systems for raising fish like they do in some parts of India and Asia?

The lagoon is not a good fit for permaculture or fish growing, ask yourself this question when contemplating any alternative to either septic tanks or sewage plant systems.
"Would I be comfortable drinking from that water source?" if the answer is yes then it is a good idea, if the answer is no then DON"T DO IT!

Most of the issues of lettuce and other produce recalls over the past 5 years were traced back to Lagoon systems and the sludge from them that was used on fields.
A lagoon system works but only if it is the interim holding method and those contents will be further processed by fungi and bacteria somehow.
Lagoons are simple, huge settling ponds, the pathogens fall out of the effluent and settle into the sludge for the most part.
In these systems the effluent water will always contain some of the pathogenic bacteria which will need to be neutralized by further processing.

Redhawk

First, I would use sawdust instead of woodchips. Sawdust is more hydrophyllic than woodchips, and so would be friendlier in terms of sloshing of liquid contents. Yes, you said urine diverter. I disagree with that automatic assumption of necessity, and we'll get to that in a minute.

Sawdust also has a much greater surface capacity, allowing for smells and offgassed volatiles to adsorb onto it with greater efficacy than a mass consisting of larger particles with a comparatively smaller surface area.

In an RV, I would submit that you need the urine to kickstart the thermophyllic bacteria into a hot compost. I would also make modifications to that end, wherein perhaps a worm screw feed can be turned on periodically, in reverse to mix the contents with more carbon, in the event of smell, and in forward gearing to push finished humanure compost out of an evacuation tube.

If what is being expelled is soil, and unrecognisable as anything else, not only is it safe, but if it is dropped in a woodlot and someone happens upon it before the elements disperse it, they won't think any more of it than if it had been the excavations of a burrowing animal.

-CK