The Historic District

Our cottage does not have running water, and the one estimate I've gotten to drill a well, add septic, and plumb a kitchen and bathroom was about $10k. I've been watching Tiny House Nation and reading a lot about living off the grid. Anyone here have any experience with or knowledge about composting toilets and potable water systems? I'm thinking that's our best bet.

Thanks!

Carrie

Hi Carrie,

I don't have one myself, but my son's boyscout camp, where I help out, put composting toilets in about five years ago. Each bathroom (which here are free-standing structures) has a mechanical room underneath for the composting. They work great.

That said, have you priced out the composting/potable water system you are thinking of?

I ask, because a septic system, and a well, and plumbing for a bath and kitchen, all for $10K sounds REALLY reasonable to me.

Chris

"I ask, because a septic system, and a well, and plumbing for a bath and kitchen, all for $10K sounds REALLY reasonable to me. "

I second that wholeheartedly! To drill a well here is $4000-5000 and a septic system is $15,000-$25,000. Running plumbing for a bath and kitchen would probably be another $3000 including fixtures.

If you can get it all for $10,000, my suggestion is get that in writing and go for it!!

Are you sure that bid isn't 10g's for each part of of the job? It seems low for replacement of vital systems that are all labour intensive.

As for off-grid, at some rural cousins' home in the hill country, they had a privy when I was very young-it was cold in the winter and hot all summer, and had to have lime put down the hole after you were done. The hole was another deal-depending on how many were in the house the hole had to be redug and the privy moved (later it had a cement tank, cistern-fed flush toilet, and some powdered bacterial digesting compound was poured down regularly.)

The kitchen sink had a pump to the cistern (as well there was a wood cistern in the attic that flushed the toilets and fed the bath tub, but you only washed with that water-it had roof debris and as hard as we tried to filter it always seemed to have things in it that weren't meant to be ingested.

The well pump was for drink water; it was twenty feet west of the house, and you filled the indoor tanks each morning. Figure two to four gallon per day per person, one to two for each animal dependent on size. A five gallon pail weighs forty pounds, so for four people, a pair of cats, and a pooch figure a couple of trips at forty pounds per.

Put your wash machine where you can gravity feed it, and the grey water can go through a filter box and be used to some advantage in the yard, same as bath water and dish water if you use soap that isn't full of nasty chemicals. Good old brown lye soap is not too bad for this purpose. If you plumb a separate cistern, grey bathwater and old wash machine and dishwater can be run through sand and gravel and used to flush the stool.

If you use honey jugs in the bedrooms, empty them into a plastic compost barrel with old leaves and that and roll it a half turn or so a day, it'll break down to decent fertilizer, just not for use on certain edible plants. Check with your county extension office on those-they may have a brochure.

More as I think of it if you want some,
Cheers!
Chaz

If you put gutters and capture the rain water from your roof, you can easily keep a cistern full enough to wash with and flush the stools most of the time. Take a roof on an smallish to avarage sized bungalow-about 7 square. A half-inch of rain will mean a cubic foot per 24 square feet of roof. that's 29.1 feet, or 218 gallons. Run it through a sand and filter box, and the wash water can do double duty, and flush a stool when it's played out as wash water.