The indoor willow feeder at Cooper Cabin - a.k.a. "The cooper pooper"

And here are some pics from the construction process.

The plans:

The old wall had to be taken down and new one built:







There was a grey water drain in there already ( this is where the sink will go in):

         


The corner where the "pooper" is going to be:

       



Sink is ready:

And voila!





Beautiful door frame made of sawmill off-cuts:

Here is a group of smiling folks gathered inside the "cooper pooper" during a tour of Wheaton Labs. They smiled when Paul asked the question: "how is the smell?'

What a beauty!  Looks amazing.  

I wonder if the folks at Wheaton Labs who are dealing with the.. ahem.. backend :) of the system have any comments/feedback about the differences/ups/downs of an internal willow feeder versus the outdoor ones.  

So fancy!   It looks a real indoor bathroom!  

Thanks Liv for finding all these great pictures!


Are there more images of the design?   Are there plans available ?  


I would love to build one of these myself.

As part of Katie’s Poo Crew at the 2024 PTJ, I got to tour each of the willow feeders at WL; Cooper was definitely the most luxurious!

Sadly, I wasn’t in a place to make use of this one, but I did take a photo I’d like to share!

One thing to note, there are two schools of thought when it comes to ventilation of the candy box - passive and forced.
Some willow feeders have a trombe wall or similar device creating a thermosiphon and passively drawing air out of the box (to be replaced by the ambient air in the room).

The Cooper Pooper is slightly different. There is a small 12volt fan wired to a usb plug, attached to a rechargeable battery pack (phone charger style, I think the current version might even have a built in solar panel) forcing the air in the box outside with a continuous draft.

On the one hand, a passive thermosiphon requires almost zero intervention and is largely forgotten as it works behind the scenes.
On the other, a fan might move more air more quickly, depending on the quality of design, plus ‘fan go brrr’ - as long as that battery pack is charged.

High Commander Stephen requested a design with a fan for his Poo With A View

Alternatively, I think it’s fair to say Paul prefers the solution which mitigates humans being human and doesn’t demand regular maintenance.

We made some deposits the week of September 23 as we were staying at Cooper.  As we both age and have a greater need to relieve things in the night, we opted to stay in a location that had some indoor amenities.

Toward the end of our stay, Ringer Jennifer was working on setting toward setting up a solar panel to charge the battery pack to run the fan.

It really is quite a nice room for a cabin.

Please show the guts and any outdoor access doors! I need to implement something like this for winter!

Please please!
Kim

Kim, the poo is accessed from inside as well. The bench opens from within the bathroom. So ya gotta drag the compost through the cabin. The only opening to the outside is the fan Clay mentioned and the pee siphon hose.

I stayed in the cabin and used this pooper for two weeks. The urine diverter wasn't adequate. Just a screened engine oil funnel with a garden hose attached with a sprinkler clamp. It came apart while we were there, backing up and spilling urine inside the cabin on the floor. By the 5th day, the cabin smelled so bad! It was very difficult to sleep one room over. I had to get in there on the weekend and snake the hose and scrub the floor. All of us ended up peeing in pitchers and taking them outside. (7 people pee more than a half gallon between bedtime and breakfast...)

After I took out the willow candy bin, the stay became much less smelly. I think a better urine diverter
could be constructed from a commode specimen catcher from Walmart. Cheap! And no worries about "oh no, I have to pee while I'm crapping...."

I also think there needs to be more education in the cabin about how much carbon material to use. Good stink-less composting needs to have something close to a 20-to-1 by volume sawdust-to-poop ratio. So if you poop a big spud, you gotta use half a gallon of sawdust or more! The tiny coffee mug scoop that was available in the sawdust bucket inside the cabin didn't encourage folks in the event group before us to use enough carbon. So there was definitely an outhouse smell until I changed the bucket out.

We used the fan, re-charging the battery pack every day. On days I forgot to set our solar charger outside, and we had no fan at night, the smell was overwhelming and I couldn't sleep.

We ran out of sawdust halway through our stay and began using wood ash, the suggested alternative. DO NOT try this!! The smell worstened, and there was a strange perhaps connected phenomenon with the carbon monoxide detector going off in the cabin the same day. Maybe fumes created by the ash-potty combo set it off?? Who knows enough about chemistry to know?

So the bathroom is nice-looking, but if the mentioned problems weren't addressed, I give the indoor willow feeder a 1 out of 5 apples! With inexperienced campers renting it out, its probably better that the fumes stay outside!

You are a treasure, Rebekah!
Your account had me cringing and crying with laughter. Thank you for sharing your insights!

Rebekah Harmon wrote:I had to get in there on the weekend and snake the hose and scrub the floor.

Did you happen to take any pics of that delightful duty? It sounds awfully like an improvement to the urine diverter to me
https://permies.com/wiki/156765/pep-greywater-willow-feeders/Improve-Urine-Diverter-Willow-Feeder

I like that Walmart Special!
Mike and I were trying to brainstorm some design modifications during the PTJ. He suggested the “Wrigley Field” style trough urinals as a template.
I don’t have any experience with metalworking yet, but I was mocking up some designs out of waxed cardboard milk cartons the last few days of the event.
Maybe I’ll work on that as a winter project.

Hey Clay, I think there's a large potential for sawdust getting into an open trough of any style. Leading to the urinal drain needing to be snaked. A screen has upsides and downsides too 🤔

Agreed on both fronts, Rebekah.
I was definitely thinking of a screen, and hoping that a steeper angle might reduce some of the screen issues that I encountered.
I’d be curious to hear other ideas anyone has.

Has anyone ever inoculated the saw dust with e.m. or lactobacillus? I experimented one year in my garage with a 5 gallon pail and shredded paper sprayed with inoculated molasses.
The smell was minimal and the waste seemed to break down quickly. But mostly, I'm wondering if the inoculated spray helped to fight the poop germs.

How the women at wheaton labs deal with shark week while using willow feeders:

Flush toilets stink, literally! Willow feeders are fresh!!

A quick tour of the 4 willow feeders at Wheaton Labs

An overview of the cooper pooper:

Watch the trailer for the willow feeder movie: