The narrowboat toilet dilemma

Pump out? Cassette? free-standing Porta-potti, incincerating or composting toilet? An important but bewildering choice narrowboaters have to make

We've experienced using pumpout and cassette toilets on hire boats and of the two, prefer cassette.  A group of four of us needed three pumpouts over a two week period at £18 per pumpout and the worry of finding a station before the tank was full.  I won't mention the smell, and the thought of carrying round your own waste for days, and the space the tank takes up which could be used for storage of useful things. 

With cassette, depending on number of board and how frequently you use if, a cassette only lasts a couple of days. You therefore need to carry at least one, ideally two spare cassettes, which have to be stored somewhere. And you need to be emptying those three cassettes around once a week - - an unpleasant job.

In our new build narrowboat, we have dismissed pumpout and cassette for the above reasons. That leaves us with incinceration (combusting) and composting.

After a lot of research, we have decided of the two toilets we will have on board, at least one will be a composting toilet system   

So we did we chose a composting toilet? An easy decision for us: 

• no toxic chemicals, 
• no wasting fresh water to flush, 
• no smells - so we're told - (future blogs will confirm), 
• low maintenance,  
• a sustainable choice. 
• high initial cost but low thereafter. 
• no more worries about toilet reaching capacity - weeks of cruising time without being tied to finding Elsan point or pumpout.

The different brands: Before chosing a Separatt, we looked at:

• Kildwick (didn't like styling, have to manually shovel your waste out of the toilet, but a popular choice for many narrowboaters) * Kildwick has now closed down
• Airhead - didn't like styling although a good choice for narrowboats and other boats as quite a small unit,
• Build-your-own - err - no thanks - we don't know enough about it
• Nature's Head very popular - again need to shovel out the waste afterwards

The Separett was chosen it looks like a "proper" toilet which was important us and most importantly, you don't have to shovel your waste out of the toilet after a few weeks.  Yes, it is slightly larger than other narrowboat toilets, but in our new build, we build the space in. There is no "stirrer" in a Separett, instead the contents are rotated when you sit down. When it gets near full, you tie up the biodegradable bag, removed the inner bucket, put the lid on, and store the bucket in a locker or the engine bay until (in our case) take it home and put it in a "humanuer" compost bin (we have a lot of land at home)

Our main concern is that it will smell. We've been told and read many times that as long as you separate the urine (into a urine container) and the solids, and run a small fan (included with the Separett) there is no smell.  We had XR&D Boatbuilders build special vents in the side of the hull so at that time, whatever toilet system we might finally choose, we had the infrastructure already there.

Of course, at the moment. all this is academic as our Separett toilet won't be used until the boat is launched. We will blog about our real-life experiences later 

So for all those reason, we chose a composting toilet.  Will it prove to be the right decision?

We are also seriously researching combusting (incinderation) toilets - they are just so awful looking at the moment . . . . . . . . . .