How to make a compost loo
To see the compost loo I made for the main house, see the blog...
In summer 2007 we made a new compost loo for the B&B. There are many different types of compost loo - sleek moulded plastic ones costing lots of money, large "shed" style arrangements over huge concrete pits, and "bucket and chuck it" sawdust types like ours.
The large pit-style toilets are mainly maintenance free - the toilet is used for a long period of time (obviously depending on how many people are using it) and once full the pit is sealed to allow decomposition whilst a second toilet is put into use. The thing about this sytem is that it takes up room and involves building the pits, etc, which just isn't possible in our case. So we have gone for a sawdust toilet which is emptied by hand onto its own dedicated compost heap, mixed with other organic matter and turned into fabulous compost.
Before you think about making a compost loo, you need to read the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, it is full of information and an essential read for the Humanure composter.
This loo is very easy to make, you need only basic carpentry skills and tools. I went along to our friend Paul's house as he has a workshop which makes life easy, but it really isn't necessary!
So here are the photos I took during the building of the compost toilet. You can see that it is really fairly simple, there are plenty of different ways you could design it, this is just one of them. We didn't use any clever joints, simply glue and nails. I'm not giving specific measurements because it depends entirely on the size of bucket you use. I have used a 35 litre bucket - when full it is quite heavy enough! - and built the toilet around that, but you could use a much bigger bucket and use a trolley to take it away. A bucket smaller than 20 litres will really fill up too quickly and become a hastle to maintain, even for one-person use.
You will need planks of wood (I bought fabricated planks which were 50cm wide), some timber for making the frame (in France this is called a "chevron"), a bucket, a loo seat, a saw, glue, screws/nails...
Having worked out our dimensions, we made a frame using 4 pieces of timber slotted together using a simple half-lap joint...
Paul (sporting very nice ear muffs) cuts up the four side pieces with his super-dangerous saw.
The sides are then glued to the frame, and nailed and glued to each other to form the box.
The lid overlaps slightly as I felt this looked smarter.
Paul cuts the hole with a router, but you could also use a jigsaw.
A bonus of using a router is that afterwards you can rout a curved edge onto the hole, which you can otherwise do with some sandpaper and a good, stong elbow!
On the underside of the lid, we put blocks to stop the lid moving around (alhough I later added hinges which means the blocks aren't really necessary).
Here's the finished loo in the bathroom of the B&B, sporting a lovely pine seat and loo-roll holder.
I originally coated the wood with linseed oil, but I found that this discoloured when it came into contact with "splashes" from guests and in the end I sanded it back and applied an external-grade varnish as I want the loo to last a long, long time!
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