Composting toilets

Bet you've never given too much thought to toilet design...  Well, the one thing that Mohare has in short supply (except in the monsoon season) is water.  Flush toilets take a lot of water.  So our other project was to install a composting toilet.  Basic concept is that every time you go, you add some extra organic matter (wood chips, or something like that) into the chamber.  Then after about a year of use, that chamber gets sealed, and good bacteria turns it all into compost.  While that is happening, you move the toilet over a second chamber and use that, and then just keep switching off each year.  Composting toilets don't use any water, don't generate any hazardous waste that has to be disposed of, and wind up with compost material.  What's not to like about them?

So when we got there, they had four toilets already installed - two at the lodge and two outside the dining building - all of which required water.  Our original plan was to build a totally new (small) building to house the composting toilets.  But after looking at all of the options, we figured out that the best thing to do was to use the two existing bathrooms that are attached to the outside of the dining building as the chambers and make a bathroom inside on the second floor of the building above those chambers.

This was a bit "out-of-the-box", and it was initially met with some skepticism.  But after we talked everyone through it, they were into it.  We didn't have all of the wood that we needed, so we got it started, and they will have to finish it for us.  Since the Home Depot is kind of far away (like, on another continent), the Nepalese people make their own wood planks by cutting down trees and sawing the trees into boards.  So they will have to do a bunch of that to finish it up.  But it is nice and warm up on the second floor, and I think that having a nice warm bathroom is way better than having to go out into the cold...


Here is a picture of the steps that Jess, Alex, and Bruce built to go upstairs:

And one of Jess standing on their stairs:

Here's what the outside of the building looks like.  The doors on the left go into the existing bathrooms. So the way it was set up when we got there is that trekkers had to go out of the dining area from the door on the far right, and then go into the bathrooms from the outside.  Now they can stay warm and dry inside the whole time.

One of the first things that had to get done is that the wall between the two existing bathrooms had to get knocked down.  My kids and Alex enthusiastically did that part.  They are very good at destruction...  It was hard to get a picture of it, but this one shows Brad and Jess checking out what had to happen.  The toilet will go inside the building on the second floor above these existing bathrooms.

Jessica and Alex drilling a hole in the wood using an old-fashioned hand drill.

We ran out of PVC elbows and Ts, so they cut the pipes at a 45o angle and "stitched" it together with wire to make the exhaust pipe.  It ended up looking like a giraffe.

This picture is a little hard to figure out, but it was taken from the second floor of the building - looking down into what will become the chambers.  The man is sealing the chamber with concrete.

Here's how the concrete got up to Mohare...  Some farmers with horses put the concrete on the horses, and then they hike up the mountain.  After they get it up to Mohare, then guys put it in baskets on their backs with a strap over their forehead, and they carry it up to where we needed it.

A broader view of the dining area: