THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

milasavesmoney

VJsmum An Adventure!!! Please tell us more when you get back to wifi. It sounds amazing!

I was reading about the uses of cat litter in a prepping sense. Putting in a plastic trash bag and kitty litter at the bottom of a 5gal bucket used for a toilet can cut down on smell and make waste disposal easy. It also saves precious water from not being used to wash the bucket out. Proper waste sanitation would be crucial in many scenarios. A pit could be dug to place the plastic bags into and since most plastic garbage bags don't decompose for, by some estimates 500 yrs it would be helpful in a sanitation crisis...

culpepper

We are just back from 4 days camping and used my new home made loo. Needed for the night time treks after a few near accidents at the last camp site.
It is an old fold up aluminium stool, seat removed amd a pool noodle fitted on the 'sitting edges'. A big black bin bag wrapped around the foam and down into the void. Then we put biodegradable bags inside to contain the business. The bags held with flat pegs. A bag of wood based kitty litter stood beside it. Each use, we added a handfull of the litter and every two uses or when needed, tied the small bag and dropped it into the larger one. The large bag is much longer than the small and hid the small tied up bags well .
The litter was perfect at hiding any smells.
The campsite had compost loos and swadust but still niffed a bit as it was very warm weather, while our little loo smelled of nothing but wood . We used it in our new pop up loo tent which doubled as the shower tent and wasnt at all unpleasant.
It felt quite posh to be able to just pop next door when needed . Loo rolls were tied to the tent inner and we had a bottle of hand sanitiser for hand washing.

carolbee

That sounds amazing Culpepper, very inventive.

Where are you in Kent?

Doveling

No pooter yesterday.

VJ - have a fab time. Sure you'll come back with all sorts of tips for simplified living

I recall a couple of aunts in villages who had the outdoor privys at the bottom of the garden. I used to dread using them as they were full of spiders - large ones :eek:
Does anyone know if these were emptied or filled in and moved to a different position occasionally? (The privy not the aunts :rotfl:)

For those of us with gardens would this be a viable option again?
Or are there laws on human waste disposal?

Culpepper - brilliant :T

culpepper

I think the outdoor bottom of the garden privvies had a bucket under.
Grandads did according to mum. He used it on fruit trees I think.
Some go to cesspits and I suppose the flush must be plumbed in on those.
Our last house had an outdoor loo but it was plumbed in and flushed to the sewer system. There was a long clay tube pipe which extended under each of the loos in the row of houses which meant that when one loo blocked, so did all the others behind it.

When I was small,we had one outdoor loo shared by 4 families. It was built into the outside wall of the house.
We only ever used newspaper for cleaning up because mum refused to supply the whole house with loo paper.
Night time was always taken care of with the gazunder and dealt with discretely next day .


We are in the county Town carolbee

maryb

:hello:Hello all popping in again while wifi works

I had one of those compilations of old issues of the Women's Institute magazine and one from the 1920s gave VERY detailed instructions on construction and use of a privy.

Well away from the house so flies were at a distance from the kitchen - although with 'proper management' there wouldn't be too many flies to start with.

Basically there were two buckets under the seat and two holes, one for pee and t'other for.....t'other. The key thing was to keep no 2 bucket dry then it wouldn't pong. So there was always a big bucket of sawdust or ashes with a scoop and the business was carefully covered up. The pee bucket was emptied on the compost heap and acts as a compost accelerator. The other bucket was emptied into a trench at the end of the garden and covered with soil. After about five years it was ok to plant fruit bushes over the trench but not veggies. So they were VERY careful about management of their night soil.

Thing is I am just about old enough to remember arrangements like that in houses in the country when I was small and before they got mains drainage. And the two side by side seats were not about being ' companionable' as some current day social historians like to snigger. It was about hygiene and careful management and the avoidance of squalor. Did they really think that people in what was generally a self respecting and prudish age would be so laid back?

mardatha

Doveling the army dig latrines all the time, I'm sure there wouldn't be a problem and if there are laws against it then you'd just keep quiet about it and nobody would be any wiser

ivyleaf

My Nan had an "earth closet" in one half of the garden shed and it did get emptied regularly

greenbee

Doveling wrote: »

I recall a couple of aunts in villages who had the outdoor privys at the bottom of the garden. I used to dread using them as they were full of spiders - large ones :eek:
Does anyone know if these were emptied or filled in and moved to a different position occasionally? (The privy not the aunts :rotfl:)

For those of us with gardens would this be a viable option again?
Or are there laws on human waste disposal?

I remember those too... They had an elsan (chemical toilet) and the 'night soil cart' came through the village regularly.

Before the chemical toilets it was a case of using it as fertiliser... so all the lovely productive veg plots down the end of those bijou cottages are very well fertilised

There are rules about mixing waste streams - for example you can't (or couldn't last time I looked into it) put sewage sludge and garden or food waste in the same anaerobic digester...

GreyQueen

When Mum was growing up as a country lass in a series of very much unimproved tied cottages back in the 1950s, the privy was a shed with a bucket loo. The bucket was emptied every few days into a hole dug in the veg garden. When grandad was very poorly, Mum had to take on the digging, even as a young girl.

A few years later, there was a nightsoil cart which used to visit once a week to collect the unmentionables.

If you think about it logically, and not from the pov of people who've grown up with it, purifying water to drinkable standards then voiding your bladder and bowels into it is bizarre and wasteful. Especially as mammalian byproducts are extremely full of fertiliser, as well as having pathogens in them.