DIY Composting Toilet
“Make your own composting toilet using a 55 gallon drum, peat-moss and a few other items.”
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“Make your own composting toilet using a 55 gallon drum, peat-moss and a few other items.”
This is a great video because the Loveable Loo folks have gone the “open source” route in showing you how a sawdust toilet is built and giving you the option to be inspired by what they’ve done or to buy a Loveable Loo from them.
This is a simple sawdust toilet – one component in a humanure composting system. They use a plastic bucket that needs to be emptied into a composter/compost bin.
This is the best small farm biogas system video I’ve seen so far.
As with many other useful technologies, we don’t hear much about biogas in this part of the world while it’s being rolled out extensively in the developing world and is a technology that could be universally useful.
Here a small farmer, Edward, in Uganda shows us his underground biogas system. It’s actually pretty elaborate and if maintained properly, he says should last about 70 years.
Edward keeps cows and sheep but seems to just use the cow’s dung and urine for the biogas system. He says that he mixes one part dung and one part water or urine and lets this mixture drop into a digester.
From the digester the digested solids and gas are separated in an underground dome (7 feet deep and 14 feet across).
From there the gas is piped into the farm house to the stove (which looked pretty much like a normal propane stove to me) and to fuel one gas lamp (which I found produced very dim light, but before they probably had no light at night or used kerosene lamps, so for them it’s a huge improvement).
The digested solids, now good for use as fertilizer/compost, drain out into a kind of pond area.
Edward notes that the covers to all of the biogas system access points are very heavy concrete to prevent children or vandals from fiddling around with them and either falling into the dome to their deaths or letting the precious biogas escape.
As he shows us his biogas system, Edward also points out his 10,000 liter rain water collection cistern.
Note that this system only uses waste from livestock but that other systems would also use humanure.
John Njendahayo, a Ugandan engineer, explains more about this kind of domed biogas system. Cue the following video to 4:25 where he starts to talk about the system itself. He covers the sizing of the systems, the relationship of input to output and what you can run on the biogas (including a modified paraffin fridge).
The system uses dome shapes so that none of the gas gets trapped in corners as it would in a rectangular digester. He notes that the reason for burying the digesters is to keep the temperature constant for the bacteria.
Here he talks about being able to sell the compost the digester produces as fertilizer and about needing to clear the pipes of condensation and how the gas is piped into the house.
simplelivingskills shows us how to make a simple, inexpensive, indoor worm composting bin:
Liz of BigTexWorms gives us the low-down on how to care for the worms, how best to prepare their food, bedding, etc. Liz has got to know everything about red wriggler worms.
The idea here is that regular pavement doesn’t allow for water to seep into the ground. Instead, usually we end up with a lot of pollution in streams and rivers flooded with stormwater run-off or (sometimes severed) flooding. Porous pavement can prevent all that…
Porous Pavement from GreenTreks Network on Vimeo.
Francis Hill farms in Waboden, Manitoba, Canada. Here she shares a tip for using fish guts and bones to fertilize potato plants. She gets the fish bits from anglers.
Apparently fish are a great fertilizer. With all the contamination that has been showing up in ocean and especially in freshwater fish I would probably feel a little nervous about this method.
Loren Luyendyk from Santa Barbara Organics talks about water.
Topics:
– How you can use swales to redirect water on your property and also to encourage water that might otherwise flow away, taking topsoil with it to sink into the soil.
– Mulching to help retain water in the soil.
– Collecting rain water and storing it in tanks, in plants on your land and in manmade ponds
– Greywater – Use water more than once. Really easy set-ups and more complicated ones.
– Blackwater (sewage) – Treating the sewage with vegetation. Gives a reed bed example,
– Flowforms to oxygenate water
Introduction to Permaculture Part 2: Water from sbpermaculture on Vimeo.
This is a great talk by Laura Allen (here walking us through her home humanure system) and Gregory Bullock about setting up a home graywater system.
“Greywater (water that comes from sinks, showers, and washing machines) turns wasterwater and its nutrients into irrigation water, saving time, money, and fresh drinking water. Whats more plants love it, especially fruit trees, berries and vines. Last year California rewrote its greywater code, making simple greywater reuse legal and affordable. Learn the why and hows of greywater reuse, and how to transform your household plumbing into a greywater irrigation system.”
They are in California so some of the impacts, positive and negative, that they talk about here focus on that state, but the issues are similar everywhere.
The talk covers really important Dos and Don’ts. Some topics mulch and mulch basins as filters, choosing good soaps and cleaners to use in your home if you are going to set up a graywater system, how to set up plumbing for the system (they look at a system that uses the pump on the washing machine as its driver), costs, types of crops it is suitable to irrigate (apparently root crops are out but it’s fine for “fruit” and leaf crops.
The Real Know How 