So unless you are under pressure to build your own long drop, dunny, out-house, crapper, privy or toilet. You might like to skip along and wait for the next poetic blog about how Skye helped rescue a baby dolphin that had beached itself. Or not.
There are five things you are aiming for, when building a loo:
1. Being Environmentally Friendly
2. Being comfortable
3. Having some privacy
4. No smell
5. No Flies
We came up with a simple model of our own, combining (borrowing and stealing ideas)a little from everything we had read and heard.
To achieve the first three points are easy.
It is the last two, the smell and the flies, that are tricky.
To remove flies and smell, you need to focus on the following:
1. Keeping things as dry as possible (wet poo smells bad, very bad. Dry poo hardly smells at all)
2. Creating a living loo (No chemicals. You want your solids to decompose and get eaten and processed and turned into compost. You want a lot of earthworms and creepy crawlies and microbiological activity. They are your friends. They should make your loo smell alluring, like the sweet woody smell of a forest after the rain)
Our design was simply about digging a hole,as deep as we could without being buried alive
I suspect the kids wouldn't have minded the extra excitement of the old man being buried though.
Sonja, lovelingly gave me the following advice: If it caves in on you keep one hand in front of your face and stick the other up in the air. As I was alone when digging, I presume this was to make finding my body easier.
I can see the thought process - "well, he is under already, and it would save a whole lot of work. Lets just get his hand back under and close it up.
Anyway, back to digging. Once we had got as deep as we could it was then about creating a chamber, or cave at the bottom of the hole, where we would encourage bacterial and microbiological life to flourish.
Into this we would drop our used goods.
To stop the whole thing from caving in, we would create a vertical tunnel up from the chamber to the loo seat, by cutting out their tops and bottoms, and then joining a couple of oil drums to form a tube.
Once everything was filld in, the top drum would stick out the ground slightly, and into the lid of this we would fit a 20 litre plastic bucket (again with no bottom). Around this we would fit a wooden box, with a loo seat. Easy.
Imagine for a minute you are a piece of crap. For some of us this is easier than others. Upon attaining your freedon you would free fall (without touching sides please)through the 20litre bucket, down through the top drum, down through the bottom drum, and gently land on mesh platform about 30 cm from the bottom of the hole, where you would get dried and eaten quickly, and turned into compost. And shat on. Eventaully you would trickle down through or over the platform to the bottom of the chamber, which would itself be lined with a mattress of grass and living microbiological organisms and earthworms and you would be converted into rich soil.
The whole structure is buried, and the only part not covered by earth is the top quarter of the second drum sticking out of the ground.
We will fit a chimney (extraction) pipe into the top drum, (A PVC Guttering downpipe) that we would paint black. This should attract sunlight and then heat the air inside the pipe, which should then rise, carrying out any odours that there may be.
The only vaguely tricky parts were creating a "roof" for the cave that we could fill soil in on top of, and making a mesh screen at the bottom of the drums to catch things (yes, shit) and keep them about 30cm off the ground.
Here is how we did it:
Choose a site with a good view (this is for the comfort part)
Dig a hole about 1m wide and 2 meters long.\
Dig deeper.
Go about 2 meters deep (or until you hit water) Water is bad. It makes things smell. Dry is good.
We hit clay at about 2 meters. We waited overnight and went to look the next morning and we had a small amount of water collecting at the level of the clay. We filled earth in to take us back up above the level of the clay.
We now needed to create the chamber at the bottom of the hole. It needed to be about 30 cm high and needed to remain hollow once we had filled everyting in. After we filled in some earth to above the water level, we then built up some sides at the bottom of the hole to create a ledge to rest the top of the chamber roof on. We used old logs as they were free, environmentally friendly, and already had some microbiological and fungal growth.
On top of this ledge we created a "roof" using some old rusted window frames that we had found. This did the trick perfectly. We now had a sturdy roof support, about 30cm from the floor, strong enough to support the weight of the soil when it was refilled, and strong enough to hold up our tunnel of drums. But with at least 30 cm hollow space to encourage drying and composting. We lined the bottom of this with grass to form a dry mattress.
When all of this was in place we collected a bucket of cow dung that was semi-dry. We made sure to keep all the insects and microscopic growth with it, and then sprinkled this liberally over the grass on the floor.
We even collected and added a whole lot of mushrroms we had found. (We really want that bottom chamber to be alive and active)
I also secretly added a 10g bag of baking yeast.
All good projects need a secret ingredient.
The whole thing was now teeming with life, and there was plenty of room for everything to breathe and compost.
We then put the bottom (rusted steel)drum into place. Then it was a question of placing off cuts of corrugated roofing around the drum to form a roof over the chamber below. We simply overlapped these until we felt we could fill the sand back in the hole and it would not collapse inot the chamber. We then filled the hole with soil. Now we had a steel drum looking down into an empty chamber.
We inserted a platform at the base of the steel drum, with holes small enough to stop most solids, but that would let liquid through if required. We added a whole lot of dung and mushrooms to this as well. This means that most of your solid waste actaully stops about 30cm above ground level. Having air above and below will let things dry out more quickly.
Next we fitted the second drum into the first. We had opted to make this drum a PVC one, as the idea is that we can slip the whole top structure out and re-use it when th hole is full. (Not in my lifetime I hope)
So all we lose is the bottom drum, which is old and rusted and we got for free anyway.
Once the second drum was in and aligned, we filled in with soil all the way to ground level, then we fitted the white bucket, so that I could line up the structure and floor when I fitted it, and last of all we cut a hole for the outlet vent.
Then it was time to move onto the actual structure.
