Airhead Composting Toilet

Ok… so first thought? Same as mine. Airhead composting toilet on a boat. Yum.

So… Jess is the driving factor behind this. I’m like… Oh Hell No! (I think my head may have been weaving when I said that). As usual.. I’m usually the reluctant one. Not a big fan of change. Not a big fan of changing what works.
But the more I processed Jess’s reasons why a composting toilet actually makes sense… I warmed up to the idea… just a little.

Reasons to consider a composting head. And keep in mind… this is a list that is mostly my perceptions… before we actually put one to use.

Pro

• Doesn’t use a half gallon of water to flush down a half gallon of pee.
• Doesn’t fill a black tank.
• Doesn’t cause the issues created when mixing 1 and 2 in the black tank.
• It’s quiet.
• It absolutely doesn’t smell. So we’re told. Thank you Dani&Tate of SundownerSailsAgain We’re going to give it a go. Literally.
• With the exception of a small fan, it doesn’t use power for flushing.
• Avoids the major problem of a macerator pump that gives up for what ever reason or another.
• **Biggie… and this was Jess’s main argument. It allows you to stay in a secluded anchorage… for a very long time.. .or at least until we run out of alcohol.**

Con

• Mmmm… just the concept of it grosses me out. I’m a true American. Love my indoor plumbing.
• What to do with the product produced?
• Initial price of the unit.
• Smell. Might be my uninformed misconception?
• Stigma of a ‘non-automatic’ head. Is there a stigma?

Now for the best part of the story….
Jess does her research and decides we need an Airhead Composting Toilet. We’ve seen them numerous times at boat shows. Annapolis, Oakland, Miami… But they’re a grand.  One full boat unit.
So, one day we happen to be at Minney’s Yacht Surplus looking for surplus stuff we might need. Jess is upstairs and comes down in a flurry. She said she found something we have to have. Well… long story short… we found an Airhead Composting Toilet and it just arrived. The price… hold your hat…. $85. Yep.. that’s not a misprint. It’s clean and in great shape.

We bought it on the spot. Still can’t believe the find of the century. I contacted Airhead and sent it to them for a household seat upgrade. That’s funny.. a toilet upgrade. Anyway, I spoke with Geoff and he totally took care of us. Great customer service.

So, we’re about to begin the composting experiment. I’ve put the Airhead on the projects list. Hopefully I’ll get to it soon. Right now, I’m struggling to find a solution on where to run the exhaust hose.

Installing an Airhead Composting Toilet.

Out with the old…(perfectly working, fresh water, electric, push button), head.

Raritan Fresh Water Electric Head

And prepare to bring in the new (to us) Airhead composting head. Here it is sitting in place waiting to be bolted down. The next issue is where to run the vent… and that’s what’s taken so long to get started on this project.

Airhead composting head

So…. I guess you can call this a complete review and our impressions after the first month of use.

Where do I start?

So I think that anybody that’s read this far really wants to know how this thing works, its pitfalls, its upsides and basically… whether its worth the money and does it live up to its hype.

In a nutshell…. YES!  Or more appropriately, in Coconut Coir…. YES!

Here’s the setup.  At this point I’m pretty skeptical that this whole thing will work, so I installed it into one of our heads as long as the other head stays as is.  Our boat has 2 heads.

We installed the Airhead Composting Toilet in our forward head.  One of the issues was where to run the vent hose.  We decided to just run it to the bathroom portlight.  This is to be a temporary install to help with the proof in concept.

It was bolted in place, vent installed, then primed.  Meaning… it was filled with Coconut Coir.  Per Dani’s  SundownerSailsAgain.com  recommendation, we got some heavy duty trash bags and placed one Coconut Coir brick and 5 cups of water in it.  Let it sit overnight and then break up the brick.  This is the perfect amount of water to turn the brick into what looks like… dirt.

New coconut coir

We put this Coconut Coir into the bucket, stirred it up a little with the side crank and then…. started using it.

The instructions say to place a large paper coffee filter in place, hit your target, open the trap door, drop it in, close the trap door and then stir. That’s how it worked for a few days until we realized you don’t really need the coffee filter.  The trap door is large enough.

Once you get over the fact that it’s a composting toilet… you realize that it’s not really that big of a deal.  In fact… and here’s a big one… the biggest deal of this whole thing is urine!  Sure, the Airhead does a fantastic job of actually separating the two byproducts, but the urine tank needs to be emptied basically every day.  If not… you might not realize the tank is full until your feet get warm… just sayin’… Not sayin’ that happened but…. just sayin’ under the wrong circumstances, it could happen….

We found that when living in a slip or when around other boats in an anchorage, for us, it’s easiest to just empty the container into the other head and flush.  We still have a pump out service so our 50 gallon black tank is plenty large enough to last between services, or until we’re offshore to empty the black tank… which essentially just has urine in it anyway.

**10/21/16 Update.  We’ve found that you have to empty the urine tank every day, for two main reasons.  One, because it will definitely fill up and that could be a problem… and two, it starts to smell after a day.  We’re experimenting with different things to add to the urine container to help with the smell.  So far, we’ve tried sugar, vinegar, Lysol and Probiotics.  Our latest experiment is dried citrus acid powder and that seems to be working.  The jury is still out on which one works best… but nonetheless, it still needs a nightly dumping.

Temporary window install

So, during this first month of use, Jess and I kept remarking to each other that it absolutely doesn’t smell.  Weird, but if anything, you smell a sort of earthy, dirt smell, but that isn’t really there either.  We’d use the thing, give it 5 or so turns of the crank and be done.  After about a month we noticed that it was harder to crank and we decided that it was time to change out the coir.  Basically, dump and start over.

This starts what in my mind, is going to be the thing of horror movies.  A nightmare I’ll never recover from.  Permanent scarring. Ok, so I over-dramatize this but you can’t say we weren’t prepared.  We both had rubber gloves, a new bag to catch the old coir and new coir to start the whole process over again.  I wanted a Def-Con 4, HAZMAT suit with an integral oxygen re breathing system, and a flame thrower just in case the whole experiment went horribly wrong…. but I was overridden.

• Step 1.   Pop off the vent hose at the bucket.
• Step 2.  Unscrew the top piece to remove it from the catch bucket bottom piece.
• Step 3.  Gasp! Faint! and fall into the bucket and afterword require years of therapy.
• Step 4.  Ok, Step 3 didn’t happen.  We opened it up and saw…. what looked like dirt.  Weird but true.  Again.. no real smell.
• Step 5.  We placed the bag around the bucket, turned it upside down, cranked the handle a bit and listened as basically, dirt fell into the trash bag.
• Step 6.  Close that bag, tie it off and then dump the new Coconut Coir into the bucket.  Put the system back together and start over.  SUPER SIMPLE and really not a big deal at all.  We were absolutely completely surprised.  The thing works and it’s simple process will save me millions in therapy.

Things we learned;

• Prepare the new Coconut Coir overnight with 5 cups of water.
• Have plenty of appropriately sized, Heavy duty trash bags.
• We felt that having a Home Depot paint stir stick to use to help free up the old Coir from the edges of the bucket during change outs would be helpful.  Even though it works well, it seems some of the Coir needs to be freed up from the edges of the bucket.  We didn’t get all of it.. just most of it.  If it’s freed up before dumping, you should be able to just turn it upside down once.  We just put the paint stick in the bag with the old Coir.  Done.
• We’re now using 1-1/2 bricks.  It seemed that there wasn’t enough Coir for our current level of usage which brings me to our last point.
• The experiment can be a bit sensitive to moisture.  Meaning, we currently live in a low humidity area so we deal with Coir that dries out too quickly.  Airhead suggested we add a very slight amount of water with each ‘go’.  We’re told that users in a very humid environment deal with the opposite scenario and have to add a little bit of dry Coir occasionally.  Getting the best mixture is really not as challenging as this may sound.  It truly is just about impossible to mess up the equation.

Now…. for Proof of Concept, two things;

• We had a friend check out our bathroom to give it the smell check and make sure our noses were calibrated.  It passed with flying colors!
• Finally… the old Coir.  We put it in our main trash bag along with our other kitchen scraps and non-recyclables to take to the dumpster. After a dinghy ride with friends, carried the trash bag to the dumpster and dropped it in.  No one was the wiser and no one knew it even happened.  Maybe it didn’t!!

Concept confirmed.

Airhead Composting Toilet

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