If you want to truly feel humbled, try researching toilets. Not the shiny porcelain ones that flush using old-fashioned water and plumbing. I’m not talking about loos that you can easily buy at Lowe’s. I mean toilets that we can install in our campervan.
Pat and I have been reading blog posts, studying reviews, and watching YouTube videos to educate ourselves in order to answer the big question that all campervan builders have to ask:
Should we install a toilet?
The first thing we learned is that, when you live in a van, there is no such thing as a quick push of a lever to send Lucifer to the sewer underworld. To some degree, all van-appropriate “bowls” require some disturbing degree of personal contact in order to be emptied.
Secondly, #vanlife toilets are expensive. It’s not unusual to pay $1,000 for one of these human litter boxes, which, in my opinion, is a heck of lot of money to pay for a pot to pee in.
We also discovered that there are only a few toilet choices that are appropriate for living in a van. Some units are hardly more than a covered honey bucket. Yuck. One model is like a motorized diaper genie that twists every “flush” in space age foil. We even saw a version that literally incinerates your waste with a blast of flame.
HOLY CRAP!
My favorite van toilet review was posted by a brave and honest couple who tried out a “cassette” toilet:
We finally decided we wanted to buy what is probably the most popular #vanlife choice, a composting toilet, which diverts number one and conveniently dumps number two into a bed of peat moss, coconut husks, or wood shavings that sops it up and dries it out (Dear God, I hope so.) We thought we lucked out when we bought this composting unit, which is advertised as simple, care, and odor free.
Best of all, Pat found it on an auction website and paid significantly less than its $989 retail price. However, when Pat (and Maya) took it out of its box and placed it on our close-to-scale brown layout paper, we realized the toilet is way too big for our van. It’s not exactly Jolly Green Giant-sized, but geez, I wish we had read the fine print that says this model would be great for a cottage, off-grid house, or tiny house.
After years of camping, backpacking and hiking, I have no problem crouching behind a tree. In fact, loved ones know that I would do almost anything to avoid using a public porta-John. But someday when we’re camping out in the wilds of Alaska where bears the size of trailers can hone in on a Hershey bar from a mile away, do I really want to step outside the van in the middle of the night for a swift squat?
Nope.
So here we are. Back to square one. The terror of toilet hunting continues.
By the way, does anybody want to buy toilet?
Next up… more perils of campervan planning…
One Comment
LOL!!!!!!!! – nuf said.