How to use a composting toilet
The previous post showed you how to make a composting toilet. In this post I show you how to use and maintain it.
How to use and maintain a composting toilet is simple and essential for it to work properly. Teach your family how to use it. Here are the few basic principles of how to use a composting toilet.
Get a few 50 Liter drums
Get a few strong 50 Liter rubbish buckets. Line the bottom with a few hand-fulls sawdust or untreated wood shavings from a local saw-mill. Use one handful to cover-up after each deposit.
Do not line your bin
Do not put a plastic bag in your bin to line the inside.
Heavier people over 100 kg
Reinforce the strength of your toilet by stacking one bin inside another. This is for supporting very heavy people.
Alternative bins
Dairy farmers often have used 40 – 80 Liter drums that they do not need. Ask a local dairy farmer for a several drums. Rinse each well. Cut off the top of each drum with a hand-saw. These are free and very strong.
Alternatives to untreated sawdust
Dry, small Manuka leaves or conifer needles are good. The covering medium should be dry. Dry medium will absorb moisture and smell.
It needs to be fine enough to fill all the gaps.
Dry untreated saw-dust is best. Sawdust as coarse and rough as chain-saw shavings is suitable. Fine untreated sawdust is good too.
How to Clean the Poo Loo
Clean your Lovable Loo with just water and a little dish-wash detergent.
Do not use bleach, toilet clearer or disinfectant as this will kill all the good micro-organisms that are present to break down your deposits.
If you kill the microorganisms with commercial cleaners the composting will not occur as it should.
No chlorine. No bleach. No toilet cleaner. No germ killers. No disinfectant. No toilet ducks. These are all unnecessary in any toilet. Germs don’t need to be killed. A little dish-wash detergent in water is a quite hygienic and sanitary toilet cleaner.
Nice Fresh Pine Smell
It will smell like fresh pine sawdust. A nice smell in your house. There will be no other smells.
Inside the house
If it smells unpleasant you are doing something wrong. The most likely cause is that someone has used a disinfectant or toilet cleaner.
Outside at the compost heap
Even after emptying it into the humanure compost heap you will have no smells. If you have no straw or hay, just use garden organic matter to cover your humanure compost heap.
Keep several bins ready to use
Have several large bins ready to swap when the loo is 3/4 full. Then you can empty several at one time when it’s not raining or dark.
Keep an empty bin available at all times. Have a few spare bins.
Where to empty the Poo Loo
Full bins can be heavy. Empty them when half full. I use a two-wheeled hand-truck to move a 3/4 full Poo Loo bin. It protects my back.
Disposing of feces in sawdust requires this basic training.
I have used the above method for years with my compost loo in Hamilton. I used 3 pallets, fixed at the corners and sliding slats at the front to allow easy access.
How to dig out the humanure compost
Further reading from other websites
For further information visit these sites: Humanure ThermoComposting by Joseph Jenkins and
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What a great idea ! We have several acres and it is disruptive to run back to the house whenever one of us needs to use the restroom. We had been considering a pit pot style outhouse but worried about smell and what the neighbors would think. This system will allow us discreet convienience by letting us put the toilet in the shed and empty into the compost bin. Thanks for the post. Great information.
Yes it works well if you cover deposits with one handful of dry untreated sawdust.
This keeps the organic material from being exported from your property. It will build up soil quality as you add it to the garden a few years later.