Because I’m not allowed to click on Google Ads on my website, I entered the website into the browser and went to this blog about composting toilets. I was curious about the advertisement. Mostly about why the advertisement was being displayed. As far as I know I don’t talk about toilets here. But, it is a blog, so I had to look.
It turns out that these toilets help save water. It works by converting waste to compost. It’s 100% compost, 0% water! I think this might be a good idea if you want to save on the water bill.
Every family of four that uses an Envirolet waterless systems can save over 30,000 litres of water/year!
And we’ll eventually have 4 people flushing the toilet in this house! That’s a lot of water!
If you would like to help spread the word about it, you can read about it on this entry.
Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Do your readers a huge favor and do not recommend an Envirolet 120V electric composting toilet. We purchased one April 2007, installed in Sept. 2007 and within a month (2 adults and 1 child usage) we had serious problems. The smell was outrageous, this coming from a farm girl. The system does not perform as advertised. It does not compost, you end up with liquid sewage in the composting drawer and it costs nearly $40.00/month (Ohio) to run the fans and heater full-time. We had to move out of our new home after three months and are currently regrouping to build an outhouse in the spring. A waste of $1,700.00. I have contacted Envirolet and get the run around. We had tried all of their suggestions during the last two months we lived in our new house, to no avail. They do answer e-mails, but are better at double-talk than our presidential canditates! Also, I noticed the blog at the top of this page. This reader thinks their is 100% compost, their is actually 0% dry compost, 30% liquid sewage and 70% semi- solid waste that piles up until you have to bail out by hand! Yes, you will vomit during this process, it is unavoidable. I would enjoy hearing any comments. I wish, someone would have told me the truth, before I wasted my money on the toilet and making two mortgage payments.
Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Thank you for your comment.
I haven’t recommended the composting toilet, only wrote about it, because I thought the idea of saving money was nice. It is horrible, though, that you have gone through such a bad experience with it!
Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 7:44 am
Hi Judy,
It sounds like your toilet didn’t get enough carbon material like sawdust to absorb the fluids. What did you use for carbon? If you installed your toilet in September, I wonder if it was too cold to start the microbes going.
Do you think your heating element worked as it was supposed too?
I’m planning to install a composting toilet in a small cabin that will be used by one person, but don’t plan to spend the $1300 to $2100 on a commercially built system. It seems to me that removing the smell and heating can be done much cheaper using a low watt light bulb - I have an idea on eliminating the fan and still getting outpressure to remove the smell. I still haven’t figured out how much turning the stuff needs to compost but think that if I use 5 gallon buckets with lids and rotate those out, then the full one can be rotated after it’s removed (and a lid put on) until the stuff decomposes properly..
I’ve been doing some internet searches and it looks to me like about 50% of all websites or entries about the composting toilets are made by people working for the composting toilet companies. I’m not particularly impressed with the positivive testimonials, although I do know someone who’s used a composting toilet and it work for them.
Thanks for your post, I always learn more from the ‘problem’ posts than the ‘recommend’ ones.
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I had a similar experience as Judy - including the poor customer service (no matter how many times I asked, there was only 1 person that would talk to me & keep giving me the run-around - Anna). The electrical components of my toilet burnt out within a month of use. I consider this a fire hazard as it burnt through the wires & short circuited my whole solar PV system. The company still will not honor their warranty, despite my persistent emails. We went for 7 months without a working toilet because of them - and finally smartened up and realized we can build our own compost toilet that works better (and is a LOT cheaper) than what they sell.
Be warned & learn from the thousands I put into this toilet. Don’t buy from Envirolet!!!
Comment edited by Alisha: Last name has been removed from this comment for privacy reasons.