Once we had the hole dug and just the top of the blue drum sticking out of the ground, it was simply a question of putting up four poles, and a floor frame.
Then putting on the floor (with hole cut in it to fit the top of the drum snugly.
Place our pre-made lovable loo around the top of the drum (site tested by Mila. Then we added on a roof frame,wall frames, a door, and wrapped two layers of shadecloth around the whole thing. We still need to put the roof on, and our plan was to (painstakingly) cover the outside of the walls with groovy looking bamboo strips. But for now it is shadecloth, which, although not waterproof, is very light and airy.
We have a double seater. One for solids (down the hatch) and one for wee which goes into a bucket that needs emptying every few days (wee only - I don't have that strong a constitution that I am going to be emptying crap buckets without barfing)
Here Mila tries out the pee pot.
Followed by the real Macoy.
The idea is that once you have done what you need to (and finished off the chapter you were on), You simply wipe. There is no adding of soil or compost or wood chips. The platform off the ground means things should dry out on their own. Once a week I collect some cow dung, mix with with a bit of wood ash from our fireplace, and sprinkle it over all that lives below.
The pee bucket is currently emptied by hand, but we will fit a pipe as soon as we have a vegetable garden fenced, and will drain this into a banana garden, along with some grey water.
Enjoying the loo blog enormously thanks Charles.
ReplyDeleteI have a few thoughts and questions. Won't pee kill bananas? Pee kills many plants.
Something I don't understand is that once the 30cm void is filled with Starling / Giese excrement, then the mesh which usually helps the drying process will be buried. Then you are ready for the gradual filling up of the wet and stinky. Perhaps a few thin poles on the way down might slice and dice your poo into bite-size chunks which would dry out quicker. Even so the void will fill up. I suppose an oil drum has about a 200 litre capacity. The five of you probably crap about a litre and a half a day I suppose though most of this would be water content. A quick browse on the internet reveals that Dr Karl Fischer, professor of cack studies says that 80% water content in faeces is about right (we can hopefully ignore your and Caleb's recent 90 to 95% episodes). That means about 300g of dry waste in a man-log. Taking the capacity of the hole at around 300 to 400 litres before it's too high for comfort and the flies are buzzing around your two-veg, you will probably be able to keep on crapping for quite a while - more than three years. This is making the assumption that it all dries out. We are keeping positive but have a feeling that it might not dry out as well as you hope. Shite take a day or two to dry out based on my experience of dog turds on the pavement - and this is when they are exposed to the air too. You and your family's droppings might take some time to dry out in that fetid pit. Just as they are getting dry, your next wet load will be ready to press out. Perhaps I am being too downbeat about the drying potential of stool in the hot Transkei though.
By the sounds of your recent blogs, it's been raining quite a bit and hopefully the ground water you hit is about as high as it gets. I think that no matter how pessimistic you are, you should have a year of hard-core defecation before you need to get digging again. Please keep us posted with regular photos taken down your pit with a strong flash so that we can all monitor things around the world.
I also have a question to ask you about keeping the uric and fecal waste separate. I think that this may have been discussed at New Year but I can't remember what the outcome was. Speaking for myself, when I go to pass colonic waste I usually spurt around 300 to 500ml of liquid, nitrogenous waste from my urethral opening in a big, frothy jet. I assume that this is the case for most people. My question is if you have to pinch off the number one while you let the number two go in the solid waste loo, do you attempt to do the number one first in the liquid waste loo while pinching in the number two or do you just let the number three go into the solid waste loo with a silly, lopsided smile?
Good to hear from you guys. I am off to have a cup of tea, watch some TV and then take a massive dump in a porcelain bowl in a wall-papered room smelling of Crabtree & Evelyn.