Homemade urine diverting toilets
"I'm
sold on the idea of using urine in my garden," you may be saying.
"But how do I collect it?" Urine collection for men can be as
simple or complex as you want. In addition to just peeing outside
or straight into a milk jug, you can make a simple urinal with a bleach
bottle, a milk jug, a length of hose, and a ping pong ball. Cut
the bleach bottle into a funnel shape and connect it to milk jug with
the hose, then drop the ping pong ball into the funnel as a
stopper. When you pee in the funnel, the ping pong ball floats
and rises out of the way, allowing your urine to flow into the milk jug
reservoir. When the pee's all gone, the ping pong ball falls back
into place to make the whole setup relatively air tight and cut down on
smells. Liquid Gold has
a great diagram of this simple urinal, but I can't find one on the
internet, although you can read a longer description by its creator, Chris
Melo. I've
included a related homemade urinal picture instead, but this one looks
like you'd need a bit better aim.
Another DIY option that
is more suited to women consists of a five
gallon bucket full of sawdust underneath a potty chair. The
sawdust soaks up the urine, and the combination is 
emptied onto the compost pile
when you start to smell an odor. Alternatively, women can get a pStyle
and pee straight onto the compost pile along with men (although I have
to admit that I got sick of my pStlye after a while --- too much work.)
If you want to get
fancy, you can always buy a urine-diverting toilet,
although a quick search of the internet suggests that they start at
around $600. A more interesting storebought option is the Ecovita Privy Kit
for $112 (plus $15 shipping), which fits onto your outhouse seat and
diverts the urine away from the solid wastes. After looking at
the Privy Kit diagram, it seems like we should be able to retrofit our biochar
composting toilet
into a urine-diverting biochar composting toilet with a funnel and
length of hose. We may have to start our experiments there!
| This post is part of our Urine Fertilizer lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.