Member-only story
Pros and Cons of a Composting Toilet in a Tiny House
I spend the better part of every week living in a tiny house. The shell is a Tuff Shed, then I did most of the work finishing off the interior. I call it my art installation.
I based most of my design decisions on one simple question: Will this delight me? It wasn’t enough that it would be good enough. Would this actually make me happy?
There were a few compromises along the way. Though the septic system for the main house is over-designed and could accommodate a lot more use, adding a tiny house to the system would make it illegal. And we just didn’t want to deal with that.
So I started investigating waterless toilets that I could use for the tiny house.
Did you know that they make incineration toilets? It’s exactly what it sounds like. All the solids get burned inside the unit. The problem is that they smell how what you’d think they might smell — like burning poop — and I decided that definitely wouldn’t delight me.
They also make toilets that encapsulate the solid waste in a plastic bag, that you then have to dispose of. I decided that it was just too much of a waste.
Instead, I ended up with a composting toilet. I’ve been using it for a few years now. Here are some of the things I’ve learned, in…
