Crazy or crazy enough to work?

You can probably tell where I'm going with this. It would work exactly like a composing toilet, except instead of having to empty a container, the auger would push the material through the pipe (after mixing it), and by the time it arrives at the exit it's mostly decomposed and hopefully odor free.

The pipe would be about 15' long and mostly exposed. The exterior would be painted black to absorb sunlight and heat the tube and accelerate the process.

I've seen people do this with a gravity feed system, but then your outhouse has to be 10 feet in the air, which is less than ideal from several perspectives.

Maybe, it has promise.  Would the auger go all the way down the pipe or just past the poo hole as drawn?

I think a couple challenges might be:
1. Poop not getting pushed by the auger and just getting smeared around on the auger
2. Auger probably doesn't have to be that large a diameter but the holding capacity of the tube has to be a certain size to give the dwell time needed to compost.  Not sure if there is a pipe diameter that would meet both criteria
3. Does air need to get into the pipe to help with composting?  If so, how's it get in and out?

Mike Haasl wrote:Maybe, it has promise.  Would the auger go all the way down the pipe or just past the poo hole as drawn?

I think a couple challenges might be:
1. Poop not getting pushed by the auger and just getting smeared around on the auger
2. Auger probably doesn't have to be that large a diameter but the holding capacity of the tube has to be a certain size to give the dwell time needed to compost.  Not sure if there is a pipe diameter that would meet both criteria
3. Does air need to get into the pipe to help with composting?  If so, how's it get in and out?

I doubt there's any auger available that's that long. Shouldn't be a problem though. Assuming the auger is braced against something solid, it should be able to push the material through the pipe. The pipe would be braced against something outside on the exit end. The only real force the pipe would be subjected to is the friction of the compressed material on the sides. The compression of the material may even help. Should generate more heat that way and thus accelerate decomposition.

The idea is to keep the auger covered at all times. The riser pipe would be kept at a certain level, and fresh leavings would be covered up with sawdust or something, just like in a normal composting toilet. Then the riser pipe would have an exhaust to draw smells out the roof.

Farmers have some pretty long augers (20+ feet) for pushing grain up into silos.  

Mike Haasl wrote:Farmers have some pretty long augers (20+ feet) for pushing grain up into silos.  

That could definitely be an option. Might be an advantage since it might continuously mix the material.

I don't understand two things in this diagram.

1) What's the diameter of the pipe?

2) What's the rest of the structure? Are you imagining poop going straight into the auger, or the auger lying horizontal at the bottom of a pile?

Our composting toilets here are big manure chambers at ground level, with the user's toilet room upstairs. Two manure chambers (3 x 8 x 8 feet) under each user's room, so that we can leave the manure to compost for a year before removing it. When I lived at a school with dozens of people using a few of these, and using soil as most of the cover material, I sometimes thought an auger lying horizontal in the bottom would be good. You could leave the chamber always about 3 to 5 feet deep, and slowly be removing the bottom of the heap with auger, so that it would re-aerate and do more decomposition in an external pit before being removed by us humans.

Now at my own private house, I again have two manure chambers (3 x 8 x 8 feet) downstairs, and the toilet room upstairs is attached to the upstairs back corridor so you can stagger out of bed in the middle of the night and not go outdoors. I'm using sawdust as cover material, often mixed with crumbled leaves or coffee grounds, and dampened for a few months before use. There are only 2 to 3 people using it. When I emptied one of the primary chambers last November into the outside (secondary) compost bin, it really wasn't a big job. A friend helped and we finished in 3 or 4 hours. It didn't quite fill a 3.5 x 3.5 x 4 foot bin, and was very lightweight. What made removal slow was the chamber being narrow so it's hard to use the shovel, and having to pause to remove plastic, bones, wood and stuff. Nothing looked or smelled poopy, and I'd closed off the chamber the year before by topping it with a few big sacks of leaves and then occasionally watered it from above, so there wasn't too much recognizable toilet paper on the top. When removing it from the primary chamber, we just put the paper and dry leaves in the bottom of the secondary bin just outside so they'll be composted by the time I dig all the compost out. Removal is not a big enough annual task to justify mechanizing it with an auger.

By the way, for smell-free decomposition to happen, it needs to be aerobic, and it doesn't look like it'll be aerobic inside that pipe. Anaerobic decomposition is slower and much MUCH smellier. Also, external heat is not generally needed for decomposition, and wildly fluctuating temperatures (like if it gets heated by the sun and then freezes overnight) are likely to hinder decomposition by killing off different species. Good composting happens when there's a big volume of material all together, keeping itself damp, warm and at a fairly stable temperature, and well supplied with a thriving and robust ecosystem of hundreds or thousands of different species of decomposers.

Rebecca Norman wrote:I don't understand two things in this diagram.

1) What's the diameter of the pipe?

2) What's the rest of the structure? Are you imagining poop going straight into the auger, or the auger lying horizontal at the bottom of a pile?

Our composting toilets here are big manure chambers at ground level, with the user's toilet room upstairs. Two manure chambers (3 x 8 x 8 feet) under each user's room, so that we can leave the manure to compost for a year before removing it. When I lived at a school with dozens of people using a few of these, and using soil as most of the cover material, I sometimes thought an auger lying horizontal in the bottom would be good. You could leave the chamber always about 3 to 5 feet deep, and slowly be removing the bottom of the heap with auger, so that it would re-aerate and do more decomposition in an external pit before being removed by us humans.

Now at my own private house, I again have two manure chambers (3 x 8 x 8 feet) downstairs, and the toilet room upstairs is attached to the upstairs back corridor so you can stagger out of bed in the middle of the night and not go outdoors. I'm using sawdust as cover material, often mixed with crumbled leaves or coffee grounds, and dampened for a few months before use. There are only 2 to 3 people using it. When I emptied one of the primary chambers last November into the outside (secondary) compost bin, it really wasn't a big job. A friend helped and we finished in 3 or 4 hours. It didn't quite fill a 3.5 x 3.5 x 4 foot bin, and was very lightweight. What made removal slow was the chamber being narrow so it's hard to use the shovel, and having to pause to remove plastic, bones, wood and stuff. Nothing looked or smelled poopy, and I'd closed off the chamber the year before by topping it with a few big sacks of leaves and then occasionally watered it from above, so there wasn't too much recognizable toilet paper on the top. When removing it from the primary chamber, we just put the paper and dry leaves in the bottom of the secondary bin just outside so they'll be composted by the time I dig all the compost out. Removal is not a big enough annual task to justify mechanizing it with an auger.

By the way, for smell-free decomposition to happen, it needs to be aerobic, and it doesn't look like it'll be aerobic inside that pipe. Anaerobic decomposition is slower and much MUCH smellier. Also, external heat is not generally needed for decomposition, and wildly fluctuating temperatures (like if it gets heated by the sun and then freezes overnight) are likely to hinder decomposition by killing off different species. Good composting happens when there's a big volume of material all together, keeping itself damp, warm and at a fairly stable temperature, and well supplied with a thriving and robust ecosystem of hundreds or thousands of different species of decomposers.

Yea that's kind of the idea is that the material would build up on top of the auger before being augered out. Like basically a normal composting toilet on top, but instead of having to empty the bin all the time you would just give the auger a turn or two as needed.

I got the idea for leaving it in the sun from the composting bins we have around here. They're black and the heat from the sun supposedly helps kitchen waste decompose faster. I figured the same principle would work here.

If not, though, the pipe could run underground. That would keep it at a constant 55 degrees year round.

I would play with increasing the diameter and shortening the length. That would allow a barrel on its side approach and increase oxygen to the mix.

Should work why not. Should be solar powered .

Bill Gates was spending millions on a solar auger toilet system that was in prototype stage.