One thing to worry about when you’re off the grid is poop, or specifically how to make it go away. A lot of the older houses were on old style septic tanks. Some of these tanks were left over from the World War 2 era when the “fort” (a coastal defense artillery battery just above our lot) was being built. These days there are two options, a water treatment system or a self contained composting toilet.
Composting Toilet
From our time in Alaska we knew that composting toilets were a workable option. Unlike the incinerating toilets they didn’t use that much power, which was a big consideration given our circumstances. And the byproduct was something we needed given our rocky soil, compost! I was pretty fired up about this solution and soon researched the options on the internet. Things were looking good, then I talked to Rolando about it.
Aquaklear
Rolando had the same vision when he built his house. Being a plant lover he was also very excited about the end product. So he had gone ahead and installed the composting toilets in his house. They did work, but required a lot of maintenance. He also had problems with tech support and parts. After a while he gave up and took them out. The next thing he tried was the Aquaklear water treatment system, made in Mississippi. It’s a high tech version of a septic tank, with 2 separate compartments, and a blower and stirring system. All this stuff greatly accelerates the natural process. The end result is potable water (or almost, not planning on trying it myself). A small air compressor/blower and a computer board control the action, the thing blows bubbles through the effluent most of the time and then for about an hour a day the air powers a stirring mechanism. DIsadvantages are that it required 120 watts of AC power all the time, and that if you have a power failure lasting more than a couple of days the stuff isn’t stirred and you end up with a big solid poo mass that has to be manually removed before you can start up again. For our off grid plans power failure was not that big a consideration but the energy draw is. The end result is that we’ll have water for plant watering (Yeahh!!) but our solar panel system will have to be about a third bigger than planned (Boo!!). A quick call to the local distributor of the system and we had a 500 gallon/day system on site. Since we still had the excavator there we dug a small hole to put it in.
Putting AquaKlear in place