Saving Urine - Concentration

sorry for the random question can you cook urine down to a cake concentration or something like that to store it and use it later? freeze it or something. just wondering.

ToKunbo Popoola : unless you are going to stop peeing some time soon, you have a lifetime supply, no need to save it at all !

Simply figure out how much water your plants will need every day, make sure your urine is well diluted and use it while it is fresh.

The only common exception would be for very strong drugs like chemo-therapy drugs that should go through the municipal sewer
system if you're worried about a specific other drug, and just don't want to use your urine on food crops dilute it and Feed it to
ornamentals or your greenery ! Hope this is useful and timely ! Big AL !

Interesting question Tokunbo. I wonder if the urine is dried fast enough maybe no ammonia produced and low nitrogen loss? In a temperate climate where I live drying and storing could come in handy. Save it during the winter months when the plants are dormant. Then use it during the summer months. I guess it could be dried on a wood stove in a greenhouse to stack functions? I bet the smell would be to bad to dry indoors.

I agree that on the one hand, it's such a daily resource that there's hardly a need to store it up. On the other hand, plants don't want to be fertilized in the winter. And midwinter is when our dry composting toilets start to leak at the bottoms a bit -- icicles! because in summer there's more drying action naturally in the toilet than in winter. And for the third reason, in winter some people are less inclined to go all the way out to the toilet outhouses in winter nights, so collection in containers tends to happen, so of course one thinks of storing it till the growing season.

However, urine tends to precipitate white hard salts that look like plants wouldn't like them. Presumably would be worse on drying. And the smell of stored urine, I think it starts turning into ammonia, is really really strong and only gets stronger. The ammonia is volatile (thus the smell) so as liquid urine dries you are losing the nitrogen and creating a nuisance. And finally, to dry down such a watery liquid would take a huge amount of either heat or air exchange, and doesn't really sound very viable.

These days I've been thinking that a huge pile or container of sawdust would probably be the best way to store urine of winter through till summer. As compost of course. It would need to be really huge, I think.

An outdoor toilet that after each use gets a handful of saw-dust/wood-chips, if you then consider the added carbon of the toilet paper used I think that your compost pile at the end of it will have a very good C-N ratio. The urine will hence be stored for whenever you need it.

Rebecca Norman wrote:I agree that on the one hand, it's such a daily resource that there's hardly a need to store it up. On the other hand, plants don't want to be fertilized in the winter. And midwinter is when our dry composting toilets start to leak at the bottoms a bit -- icicles! because in summer there's more drying action naturally in the toilet than in winter. And for the third reason, in winter some people are less inclined to go all the way out to the toilet outhouses in winter nights, so collection in containers tends to happen, so of course one thinks of storing it till the growing season.

However, urine tends to precipitate white hard salts that look like plants wouldn't like them. Presumably would be worse on drying. And the smell of stored urine, I think it starts turning into ammonia, is really really strong and only gets stronger. The ammonia is volatile (thus the smell) so as liquid urine dries you are losing the nitrogen and creating a nuisance. And finally, to dry down such a watery liquid would take a huge amount of either heat or air exchange, and doesn't really sound very viable.

These days I've been thinking that a huge pile or container of sawdust would probably be the best way to store urine of winter through till summer. As compost of course. It would need to be really huge, I think.

thank you. it's good to know.

I've stored urine in 5 gallon buckets with gasket sealed lids. Helps control odor that way. I've also have stored it in recycled heavy duty plastic gallon jugs....not milk jugs, which degrade and leak. Empty rinsed out bleach bottles work fine. I haven't noticed odor when using the bleach bottles, but I do store them outdoors so maybe that's why I don't notice an odor. But be forewarned, stored urine has a strong, unpleasant odor. Thus I've switched to storing urine in the 5 gallon buckets that were first filled with homemade biochar. Eliminates much of the odor.

The only reason I need to store urine is that I have several families collecting it for me. So they store it until they have the time to drop it off at my farm, in exchange for some fresh veggies or eggs. I don't need to store over the winter. I have use for it year around.

Fancy that, another use for fermentation

Years ago my nine-year-old boy had to pee, and our only bathroom was in use. He took a pint canning jar down into the basement and used it to pee in. He put the almost full jar on top of a cabinet between the joists where it couldn't be seen. It was without a lid, and stayed there for who knows how long. Finally, it began to stink so bad we thought a rodent had died in the walls of our little pantry which was in the cellar stairway. We emptied all the shelves and found nothing. We tore out the wallboard - nothing. I finally checked the top of the cabinet with a flashlight and found the jar with about an inch of jelled urine. Mystery solved. I told my son that next time the bathroom was busy to go pee on the compost pile. It turned out well, since I was able to put shelves in the spaces between the studs, increasing my storage space for canned goods..