waste processing PO style

uNkNowN ElEmEnt · Posted: Sun Jan 09, 2005 1:22 pm Post subject:

as for organic matter to use to dilute or add to the pile to keep it from smelling etc. you don't have to use any one thing. you can use just straight dirt if you ran out of leaves or kitchen waste.

a lot of these systems are seriously over thought. they say that as long as you have equal parts human waste and garden waste (or whatever you are using) it will keep the smell down.

I've been checking this out by trying it in my cats litter box. once I started using stuff other than kitty litter, the smell did go down.

cmlek · Posted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:42 pm Post subject:

For answers to these questions, I recommend

http://www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html

pup55 · Expert Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 3676

http://www.clivusmultrum.com/

mindfarkk:

There are a few of these in service up your way, might be easy to go and inspect one in action, so to speak.

Also, the red worms might make pretty prodigious bait if you are of the fishing sort.

gg3 · Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 6:47 am Post subject:

The question is whether humans will continue to maintain their composters properly. Most probably won't, after all they didn't have enough foresight to back down from the present overshoot/collapse. I suppose one could call this a Darwinian mechanism that will help reduce population levels.

Re. all manner of compost bins, pits, privies, piles, etc.: Never forget that the common fly is an enormous disease vector. They land on your crap or even your garbage, and then on your food sources, and you get dysentery or cholera. This is a serious problem with privies: you have to be able to keep them enclosed in such a manner that excludes flies and similar vectors.

While various types of composters are viable in rural areas, I think the problem in urban areas will be water supply rather than waste disposal.

Private cars and much else will have long since been banned before sewage treatment plants are shut down or sanitation trucks stop running. However, in many regions it will simply not be possible to import water on the scale that's currently practiced. Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix come to mind, and there are many others. Regardless of banning private cars etc., if the water isn't there to import, no amount of pumping stations will get it to your faucet.

So I'm working on designs for graywater recycling systems. The basic idea is to use clean water for a washing task, and then store the graywater for use to flush the toilet. This basically makes your toilet flushes "free" in terms of water consumption.

The two obvious sources for graywater are laundry and showers. Of these, laundry water is cleaner; shower water often contains various nasties (details omitted to prevent nausea) but can be used in a pinch.

I'm presently refining my designs for urban graywater systems. One is designed for apartment dwellers, and can be added to any existing apartment (and easily removed if needed). Another is designed for permanent or semi-permanent installation in a house. I'm going to install a system where I live now (am presently collecting up the components for it) and will post pictures when it's operational.

I should also mention that for these systems, all connections are made with screw-on fittings and flexible hoses. There is no need to make any alterations in the building's plumbing. Therefore it could be argued that these systems do not require building permits or code variances, any more than hooking up a washing machine or installing a low-flow showerhead, or hooking up a lawn sprinkler to your garden hose.

Bytesmiths · Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 12:54 am Post subject:

Why the emphasis on non-food use of humanure? People have been using "night soil" on food crops forever. Proper composting eliminates the pathogens. Proper washing of food completes the job.

I see absolutely no need to sacrifice 9/10ths of your crop by passing it through an animal, just because you don't like the idea of eating something that came into contact with properly processed human excrement.
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gg3 · Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 4:11 am Post subject:

The catch is "properly processed."

To the extent that average folks don't have the skills to monitor the process adequately, the additional steps are further safety barriers against something getting through.

Also, further safety barriers against emerging infectious agents. The more steps, the lower the likelihood that a bug is going to hop species successfully all the way through the chain.

Think of duck -> pig -> human. Bird flu etc.

OldSprocket · Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 4:37 am Post subject: Humanure Handbook

I use 5-gallon pails in a cabinet. When 2 fill up they make a balanced load to carry to the special compost pile. The first pile is closed and will go to the orchard in a couple of years. Opening the current pile is about like visiting a well-maintained outhouse infrequently. (About 1 bucket per week per vegetarian.)

I HAD a Sun-Mar Centrex 3000. About $1,300. Never again.

If the Sun-Mar cooled it became a turd drier instead of a composter. Then gnats. Then the "input" end colapsed since the drum inside rotates with fiberglas rubbing on fiberglas. I was happy to haul the thing away.

With the bucket system, there have been no problems. If there WERE a problem it would be a small problem. It cost about $50 for plywood, stainless screws, and a piano hinge. It smells better than the Sun-Mar and a functioning Clivus near here. I use free sawdust from a local sawmill. I could generate enough chips and sawdust here to keep it rosy, but I'm too lazy.

Get the Humanure Handbook.

Ludi · Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 10:34 am Post subject:

Thank you so much for sharing those personal experiences of composting toilets. I was considering getting one, now I will save my money and if we need such a thing we'll make it ourselves! Thanks for saving me $600 - $1500!! Very Happy

uNkNowN ElEmEnt · Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 10:52 am Post subject:

I was thinking about building one myself. (yes that is a recurrent theme with me) I was thinking about using the hole already in most floors and putting the pot below that. then there would be two chambers a seat above to sit on and a lower catchment device.

Imagine a 5 gal. oil drum (but plastic) with a fine meshed strainer that sits in the top and can easily be removed. the urine would pass through the strainer and the feces would collect in the strainer.

then with them separated, you could process the urine right away because of the nitrogen content and compost the rest (since they say that straight feces (drier) takes less time to compost).

I suppose you could do the whole thing in a large seat right in your bathroom and then wouldn't have the draft from the hole in the flooring (which would have to have special precautions so the waste matter doesn't adversely affect the flooring)

RedStateGreen · Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2007 2:45 pm Post subject: Re: waste processing PO style

As long as you let the bucket material compost for a year or two you can put it on your garden.

I found this site really helpful: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/sawdustoilet.html

A gallery of humanure composting bins: http://jenkinspublishing.com/photo_albums/bin_album/index.htm
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Blacksmith · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:45 pm Post subject: Re: waste processing PO style

I would not suggest using night soil on your vegetable garden something about enzimes, I'm not sure about the exact details.
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frankthetank · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 11:36 pm Post subject: Re: waste processing PO style

In winter, EVERYTHING will freeze solid around here. Summer could get a little smelly. Could always just dig a whole and bury it. Maybe a catapult type system? Smile

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Bytesmiths · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 1:54 am Post subject: Re: waste processing PO style

DavidFolks · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 5:29 pm Post subject: Re: waste processing PO style

Have you considered anaerobic digestion?

Produces methane as a by product, and a nutrient rich sludge that's about 10% solids.

Compost this, or use a solar pasturization system to kill off pathogens.

Use the methane gas produced for cooking, heating, whatever you like.

Has the unfortunate drawback of having a minimum input for reasonable gas production, but takes a "waste" product and produces two useful products.
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gg3 · Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 6:49 pm Post subject: Re: waste processing PO style

An anaerobic system could be installed to serve a cluster of houses, for example in suburban or urban area (a block of condos or apartments), or in a rural area (sustainable community with clustered houses).

Then there's this, via a close friend of mine:

Rural building codes specify that sewage must be piped into an approved septic system. Very often they don't say anything about what happens after the waste has entered the septic system. So, you can install a pump in the hatch that's normally used for access by septic tank contractors' pumping trucks, lift the sewage out of the septic tank, and put it into a wetland disposal system or an anaerobic processor.

And another note re. septic tanks:

The reason they need to be pumped regularly is that food grease from kitchen drains, as well as other insoluble material (the inevitable foreign matter that gets put down the toilet or kitchen sink), accumulates in a layer at the top of the liquid that's moving through the tank and into the leach field. Eventually this layer becomes thick enough that it blocks the input pipe, and you flush the toilet and get a surprise in the bathtub.

By the way, lint from the washing machine can clog a septic system's leach field, and the only cure for that is to dig up the entire yard and replace the entire leach field: very very expensive. Thus it's critically important, where a septic system is in use, to have a high-efficiency filter on the output of the washing machine.

A nylon stocking or sock tied over the output hose won't do it. A decent filter is fairly high-tech material and something we can't count on getting replacement parts for after the crash, so one of these days I'll be working on a system for dealing with this. A gravel filter using a mix of sand and gravel from pea gravel size down to fine mason's sand is one possibility. Another possible answer is to use laundry discharge for irrigating the yard, and use shower discharge as input to the graywater system for flushing the toilet: filtering shower water is much simpler, all you have there is hair and soap scum which come out easily with a gravel filter using bank-run gravel that does not need to be precisely mixed to catch fine particles. The used gravel from these filters can be dumped into the gravel supply for maintaining gravel roads, and the quantities will not be particularly large.

Anyway, returning to our septic tanks...

When I was a kid, the local septic tank contractor's trucks were modern equipment, smartly turned-out, painted a deep green with red highlights and lettering in flowing cursive script, kept as clean as a whistle, and would have met with the approval of any fire chief who was meticulous about his engines. The contractor and his employees wore crisp clean uniforms, and went about their business with such efficiency that the homeowner would scarcely know anything had been disturbed in the yard.

And they ran on diesel fuel.

In the future it may be that septic trucks get a high priority for fuel, or
can be operated on biodiesel. Eventually petrodiesel will become unaffordable and biodiesel supplies will be stretched.

What then?

What then, is the "steam eductor." Look it up. A remarkably simple piece of equipment, it can be built on a carriage and towed by horses.

The machine consists of a boiler that can use any appropriate fuel, a tank of clean water for producing steam, and a sewage tank for the material that gets lifted from the septic system. Atop the sewage tank is mounted the eductor itself. It consists of a T-shaped fitting, in which the bottom leg of the T is connected to the hose that is placed in the septic tank. The top left part of the T is a narrow inlet connected to the boiler: steam enters here under high pressure. The top right part of the T is a larger outlet connected to the sewage tank: sewage exits here and goes into the tank.

In operation, the boiler is fired up, the hose from the bottom of the T is placed in the septic tank, and the steam inlet valve to the eductor is opened. Steam rushes in on the left of the T, and passes out on the right of the T, and in doing so, creates a very powerful vacuum at the bottom of the T. The vacuum sucks up the sludge, which is intercepted by the jet of steam and carried into the sewage tank in the vehicle. At the other end of the sewage tank is an exhaust air outlet, where air pressure created by the incoming steam and sludge can exit.

One variation is known as an "odorless eductor," and has a fitting on the tank's air outlet whereby the exhaust air is filtered; perhaps this is a simple carbon filter; I'm not sure but it should be simple enough to figure out. One possibility would be a water filter on a principle similar to the hookah: instead of smoke entering below the water to be cooled before exiting via the flexible hose the smoker puffs on, the exhaust air from the sewage tank enters below the water under pressure and exits via an opening to the outside air. At minimum this would catch aerosols and particulates to prevent a possible health hazard near the machine.

Another variation is known in the US as a "catch-basin cleaner," and in the UK as a "gully emptier" or "gully cleaner." In this variation, the suction hose is short, passes along the underside of a counterweighted arm that makes it easy to maneuver, and terminates in a length of stiff pipe. The operator opens up the roadside drains (catch basins or gullies) and lowers the pipe into the drain along with a hose for clean water. The clean water is used to stir up muck that has partially solidified, and the pipe is moved around as needed to suck all of it into the tank. When done, the pipe is lifted out and more clean water from the clean water tank is turned into the catch basin or gully to seal the drain into the sewer. Thereby the street drains are kept clean so that rainwater runoff can't back up and cause street flooding.

Why did the eductor give way to the modern vacuum pump on today's sewer and gully machines? The answer is that the internal combustion engine directly produces rotary motion, and the vacuum pump uses rotary motion as its input power; the internal combustion engine would have to operate a compressor to produce pressure for the eductor and would be inefficient in that role compared to direct application of power to the rotary vacuum pump. However when a direct source of pressure is available, as with steam, the eductor is every bit as effective as the rotary pump. And the eductor can be manufactured in any decent blacksmith's shop with simple machine tools, and has no moving parts to wear out and replace.

So, note to fellow doomers: All is not lost, there are older substitutes for modern technologies, and they serve their function as well as the newer technologies. This doesn't relieve us of the probability of a major dieoff, it just makes life more tolerable for those who survive.