Talking $h!t | Blackwater | Toilets | Things liveaboards should know

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:04]A spray can, see? Mhm. And you spray it on and the poo disappears.

[00:00:09]Where does it go?

[00:00:10]>> To our left, there is the outhouse and that's overhung straight into All right. I thought I'd take a minute. I tried to do this video inside of the generator's going while I was doing a bunch of stuff and didn't work out so well.

[00:00:23]So, I thought I'd just take a minute and uh do the video like this. Everybody who watches my videos knows I'm not much of a talking head, so having my face and whatever on camera, I'm like, "Yeah, whatever." Um but anyway, um I get asked three questions all the time.

[00:00:40]One of the questions is uh where does the poop go? You know, where do you go to the bathroom? What do you do with it?

[00:00:44]The other one is talking about uh security and what do you do for security. And then another one, of course, is money, you know, how how can you afford to, you know, come out here and do this and stuff.

[00:00:55]Um so, I thought I'd address those questions in the next few videos.

[00:01:00]And today I want to talk about the uh the whole black water waste kind of thing, what we do with that and how we deal with it.

[00:01:09]So, um a lot of people are worried that, you know, people are pumping out the black water into the lakes and rivers and stuff like that.

[00:01:17]No one that I know of in our community does that. Most of us don't even have a black water pump out kind of a thing set up to do that in the first place.

[00:01:30]Um not would.

[00:01:32]Reason being, the reason I can say that with confidence, is that everybody I know of, including myself, pull water from the rivers and the lakes. It's not salt water, it's fresh water, it's easy to do. You can pull the water from the rivers and lakes and filter it and you can use that for your laundry, your dishes and uh if you want, you put it through another filtration system and use that for drinking water. Or, if you want to, you could actually just pull all of your water through a reverse osmosis. They're not that expensive, not complicated.

[00:02:05]But that's what we do. So, we're not pumping, you know, poo water into the rivers and lakes.

[00:02:12]We uh we pull all of our water. That's how we how we stay off grid, more or less.

[00:02:16]There are a lot of different options out there in today's world um for taking care of and dealing with that stuff.

[00:02:24]And um you have the uh things like Britain. He talks about the luggable loo, which is a 5-gallon bucket, basically, with a garbage bag, a biodegradable garbage bag meant for that stuff.

[00:02:36]And some kind of a solid, whether that's kitty litter, wood chips, coconut husks.

[00:02:40]I'll add some pictures of that stuff here in the video.

[00:02:43]Um for me, um I'm using a composting toilet that separates the solids and the liquids, and I use biodegradable bags designed for keeping, you know, the the solids, the number twos.

[00:02:55]And and I use cedar chips. You could use cedar, you could use pine, you could use coconut. Coconut husks seem to be a big thing. I think the Nature's Head uh toilets that they have uh those are like 12, 1,500 bucks. They're pretty expensive.

[00:03:10]Um they made the coconut husks, I believe, popular.

[00:03:14]Uh do whatever you want, you know, as long as you're being responsible. Use whatever you want, do whatever you want.

[00:03:19]Um another one that's popular, a lot especially with camping, is the cassette toilets that use the chemicals in there.

[00:03:25]That's probably the most familiar with most people that uh cuz it you know, you fill it up with water, and then you basically flush it, and then you just pump more stuff into it. But it has a holding tank, and they have holding tanks from a couple gallons to like five, almost six gallons and stuff. And then the top part of the toilet comes off of it, and then they dump the lower half um in a just like you would if I had a the urine bottle, I'd just take that to a uh porta potty or into uh some kind of a bathroom at a park or whatever.

[00:03:59]And just dump it in the toilet. And as far as the the number two, the solids in the bag, you can take those and put those in the garbage anywhere, just like any parent does with a diaper or something, you know, they just put it in the garbage.

[00:04:12]As long as they're disposing of it responsibly, then that's that's fine.

[00:04:17]Um some people like, "Well, why don't you just go to dig a hole and well, if you're going to stay out for a long period of time when there's not a lot of campgrounds and stuff like that with the biodegradable bags, the wood chips, and all that stuff, you could easily go dig a hole somewhere and bury it, but uh anywhere around here that I've seen, there's usually uh uh uh boat launch with a garbage and a port-a-john or something not far away.

[00:04:40]There are a lot of parks that have garbages and and restrooms and stuff like that, so it's not a problem.

[00:04:47]Um but people always want to know, "What do you do?"

[00:04:52]Uh it's a it's a real popular question.

[00:04:54]And if you don't know, you don't know.

[00:04:55]So, you know, it's not a big deal, but there are a lot of options, a lot of options.

[00:05:00]And like I said, I don't know anybody in our community that's got even the ability to do it. Most of people are building their um pontoon houseboats from scratch, and a pontoon doesn't have a bathroom usually on it anyway, unless it's one of those uh Sun Tracker party decks or something like that. They might have a thing set up for cassette toilet or something, but yeah, no.

[00:05:27]Yeah, anyway, it's uh I'll show you some pictures of the system I got. It's only like 250 bucks. Um I don't think there's any need to set up or buy a Nature's Head.

[00:05:38]Um there are some conveniences to it, you know, what those are. I mean, it has a fan, so it has a fan that runs off power, and it will make sure that you know, exhausts all whatever smells or whatever. So, people say there's absolutely no smell with the Nature's Head.

[00:05:54]Um And I don't have a whole lot of problems with the one I got cuz it seals up uh snugly.

[00:06:00]So, I have no problem with it.

[00:06:02]But, uh yeah. Any questions about composting toilets or anything like that, just let me know in the comments and see if I can answer them.

[00:06:10]All right. That's my little composting toilet. It's all nice and cleaned up.

[00:06:13]Um This is the top.

[00:06:16]Liquids go here, solids go there. This is just like a trash can. Separate this.

[00:06:22]Kind of hard to do. I had to clean it up this morning just like cleaning the restroom you know, once a week you know, do some cleaning. This thing's like a garbage can basically. The biodegradable bag goes over the top of that. You put the uh wood chips or coconut husks whatever in there. There's a liquid bottle.

[00:06:38]It's separated. It's got a little rubber seal on it so it doesn't leak. It has a check valve [clears throat] on it.

[00:06:44]Quick and easy. There you go.

[00:06:46]All right. Bye.

[00:06:49]One of the things that maybe causes some of the confusion and um about uh composting black water and stuff like that. When we say shantyboats, back in the day shantyboaters you used to have outhouses and stuff like that. They would get pumped right into the lakes and the rivers. In the picture here you can see that the deck there, the guy standing on the ramp, and there's the mother, the son, and over in the far left there's the outhouse and that's overhung straight into the water or overhung over the water.

[00:07:19]Well, that's where the outhouse was.

[00:07:20]Where they went to the bathroom. That's just the way it was back then. They didn't have the options that we do today. Anyway, I just wanted to point that out. I think that there's some people that still think that this is going on and it's just not. But, anyway.

[00:07:34]Thought it was interesting. All right.

[00:07:35]Bye.

[00:07:40]Put in a um a sediment filter. This is a 5 micron. You can get them in 5 micron, 10 micron, or whatever you want. And it'll take all the sediment, the dirt, mud, bacteria, bugs, whatever.

[00:07:55]And you can replace these however so often. A lot of these three phase water filtration systems will come with a globe type of thing for your sediment filter. And you can look at it, you can see when it needs to be changed out. They're not expensive.

[00:08:10]And everything else. Those take anything that this system doesn't catch and it'll get caught up in this and then including the bacteria and stuff.

[00:08:17]I'll have it on a quick connect and stuff.