Earlier this year whilst staying at a wonderful urban wwoofing property in Melbourne I helped out with a re-design of a compost loo and helped flesh it out into complete composting system. I had recently re-read the poo-bible: The Humanure Handbook which – more recently – has been made wonderfully and freely available by its author Joseph Jenkins. I’ve retrieved my hard drive which had these photos from a friend so I thought I’d take the opportunity to get this up.
harrison st house - erecting the hand-crafted pergola
The property is worthy of a whole post just in itself but I will just briefly mention that it is an urban property which has a few ‘frozen-in-time’ features which would be more common in a country town. There is a mix of rent-payers, the owner Matthew and a few resident urban wwoofers. This mix usually means that there are lots of projects plodding along as well as the consistently productive large vegie gardens. A few of the wwoofers, Luka and Matieu, had built a compost loo before my stay but the capacity was reached when the three 40L bins on hand all filled up.
The project had become dormant and I had brought some fresh energy into the space to get the project back into action. The first version of the loo was pretty bare bones so I put some effort into smoothing rough edges and adding niceties. There was a particular interest in making it a pleasant experience for first-time compost loo users, and a time pressure of a big party planned for that weekend. I’ve always found in these kind of places time pressures particularly relating to events are good for getting the crew together to do lots of good work on the space.
My contributions were along the lines of:* belt sanding the “toilet seat” area, which was uneven pine slats *
harrison st folks
sanding a curved edge *adding a lid *installing some toilet roll holders *establishing a sawdust container for inside the loo *adding a little platform giving a bit more space, adding cladding, *pictorial signage *a little magazine rack and enviro mags * hanging a brush for cleaning * making a washing station. Later we added the compost bays which is the next step of the process.
Which all resulted in something like this:
-
- harrison st house – erecting the hand-crafted pergola
-
- a mix of urban wwoofing related characters..
-
- initial frame
-
- luka getting into character
-
- original drain into a bucket
-
- the new version
-
- with all the trimmings
-
- including toilet roll holders and a sawdust container
-
- a pretty pictorial sign
-
- a hand washing basin (with soap)
-
- and also the compost bays
-
- which were made in time for a workshop open day that we had
-
- not bad after two weeks use!
-
- complex joint
-
- used when transporting the full bucket to the bays
frugalist massive 
alicia
June 25, 2010
I really enjoyed going to the toilet in the stool shed – it is so satisfying not to flush litres of water away and dirty the sea and instead make compost to fertilize trees.
frugalistmassive
June 29, 2010
Thanks alicia. I met alicia in hepburn whilst i was finishing up two weeks wwoofing at melliodora : hepburn permaculture gardens and she was taking one of the monthly tours held there. We then also ran into each other at CERES in brunswick/melbourne and I introduced her to Harrison st through an open day which we held there. She ended up being an urban wwoofer there for a while and recently did a quick urban wwoof with us in sydneytown. Its very pleasing to hear that the loos are still functioning as the main toilet for the property and that the capacity has not overwhelmed the bay system. Yay 🙂
Alicia is from kinsale in Ireland which is exciting as its the home of the Energy Descent Action Plan which was a pre-cursor to the Transition Towns movement (its worthwhile hit the links page if thats all french to you..). She’s on her way north to the permaculure institute- soaking up as much as she can whilst she’s around. Gotta love the travellers spirit. Happy travels alicia !
dave
June 28, 2010
Love the article
though still a bit concerned
seems to imply you allow wee in ur loo…
mixing water and poo should probably be outlawed
how are you then dealing with the contaminated liquid?
d
frugalistmassive
June 30, 2010
Dave – to quickly quote the good book and hopefully put you at ease..
That chapter is here or the contents are here
. . and also dave this is a working model and as such is proof of concept. There are many systems which don’t separate the urine. In this case we encourage people to pee outside (its on the sign) but realistically this isn’t such a popular option for women. There is a drain at the bottom which goes down to a sealed clear container which you can keep tabs on and empty into the main bays when it fills up. This has the advantage of isolating the liquid element of the loo and avoiding the situation where the liquids overtake the solids which is usually possible in a Jenkins/painters bucket design. I probably should have mentiones we used a filtered liquid drain and 40L buckets. The Jenkins mantra is to use 20L buckets – no drain – and place a minimal structure indoors. Ive used that setup to good effect elsewhere but this was a good solution for this property. The party would have had 60+ folks around drinking etc with lots of women wee-ing in it : it handled that fine – saving hundreds of litres of drinking water in one night. The design is decidedly part Jenkins and part ‘natural event’ styled – with a bunch of creative urban wwoofing flare. A friend even called it a “shit hot” compost loo 🙂 I’ll endeavour to add more pics which i have somewhere.. thanks for voicing your concern dave. Was getting a bit minimal with my documentation there -d
ladydan
June 30, 2010
Wow – good to see Matt’s place continuously evolving with new projects. And good to see you keeping up the frugalist massive blog – go Dylan!