 Today we are going to be replacing our malfunctioning toilet in the cabin with a simple off-grid solution. We no longer have the toilet and as you can see the space is empty. We're left with holes in the floor, roof and a propane line inside. It's time to share our terrible experience and everything we've learned. Declining our exchange entirely unless we took down the content from our YouTube channel. So they not only have our 6k toilet but they also have our money. We would never do that. You ready to poop in a bucket? Woohoo! The toilet we're going with is a fraction of the cost of the last toilet we had. We're talking $6,000 versus $1,500. This toilet is waterless and has urine diversion systems to collect the urine separately. The solids are then separate and an electric fan dries your poop and pushes the smell outside. It has high capacity and high reliability, suitable for leisure and permanent full-time living. I've read through all kinds of forums, watched all kinds of YouTube videos of people who have had it for many years. We're very excited about this toilet for a lot of reasons and we can't wait to show you just how easy and basic the install and the use will be. And don't make him relive super toilets! It took the plungers, the whole plunger! It's going in! Cool? Cool. This is the new home of the toilet. Want to mount it to the wall? Yeah, already! As part so far is all of the pieces are numbered correctly and the instructions are easy to follow with all the numbers of the pieces. We're already moving on to venting of the toilet. There's an extremely strong fan that is going to take the smell of the waste out of the cabin. And what else does the fan do? Oh, it dries out the waste as well, which is very cool. Why don't we just use the word poop? Poop. It dries out the poop. If you've watched some of our videos, you'll know I was super against getting a composting toilet. However, this isn't exactly a composting toilet. There is no coconut core, no peat moss. It is not complicated, not disgusting, and it doesn't smell. What are you doing? Soap and water baby. That makes it easier to push the pipe onto the toilet as there is an O-ring that makes it quite difficult. Hello, cute dog. Hello, other cute dog. The snow is back, y'all. Just last week I was wearing crocs. There is so much stuff in here, but got everything you'd ever need. I'll bring this too, just in case. I can't believe at the end of this video we're going to have a working toilet. It's been so long, like an entire year now, almost. Yeah, a year that we haven't had a fully functioning toilet. The toilet we had kept working and then not working and working and then not working, and it was just like so painful. And we've been using the outhouse now for a long time. We settled right back into that idea. Before you know it, you just like, that becomes your norm, and you forget about the comfort of going to the bathroom inside. There's something to be said about waking up in the middle of the night and being able to like walk here with my eyes closed and go to the bathroom. The moon looks super pretty when you're peeing outside, but it does get old eventually. We are now going to vent our toilet, but before we just make a four-inch hole inside our ceiling, we need to make sure that there is nothing structural. Structural? Yeah, you know what I'm saying. And we are going to be going up into our loft, something that we recently built on the channel. We first need to take down everything, which is just the bed. And then we can make the hall. Perfect. A little bit of room always goes a long way. That is one big bit. So the big bit is going to go through this ceiling, and hopefully it goes through like butter. I feel like we're right in a beam. Of course, we hit it dead on, a little bit to the right actually. But that's what we get for mounting the toilet first. Definitely should have checked our surrounding stir since we're not working with a blank slate anymore. Why this works so well is because the other option was doing a bunch of 90s around the beam. And I think if we can just put it here, have room for the garbage can and toilet paper, go straight up, and then we will be having more space on the other side soon. Oh, yeah. You see me? Oh, whoa. What? That's way further out from the wall than I thought. We know that. It's going under the bed, which is why I can't cut the bed frame. Just need to make it a lot bigger, about four inches to put our three inch PVC pipe through up through the ceiling here in the bathroom. And then we are sailing out the back of the house, and that would be venting the toilet. And then that means I can almost go pee. And I've been on a pee strike for one month. Pulling an Izzy. Pretty big. Micro cement strong. Crystal is through the micro cement. Now we're going to start from up here and hole saw from the top down, because there is a gap here, and the hole saw doesn't give us enough space to do that. Okay, my turn. Thank you. Where did you make your hole? Cool. We saw that on the same angle, everyone. And a thing was obstructed. Smell's gross up here. The irony. Crystal's in the outhouse right now. She was not stoked to go. We're going to play a little trick on her. Shh. Looks like we've run into a small problem. Our pipe and their pipe are not a match. Oh no, my pee strike's not going to last. Something we learned when we installed our solar array was the thickness of the actual pipe, not the inside or the outside diameter. The thickness of the pipe is a certain schedule. I bought schedule 35 in three inch. I need schedule 40 in three inch. And then it'll fit the toilet perfectly. So we just need to get it from a specialty store. The reason why we have to get a specialty store is because in the United States, they sell it at Home Depot in Canada. They do not. We don't have anything compared to y'all. While we wait for the right pipe, we got a head start on cutting the rest of the holes on a rainy Sunday. In all honesty, there is some work that we need to do outside under the house and on the outside of the house. And considering it's a rainy spring day, I ain't mad that we don't have the pipe today. We'll get back to it very soon. I got two more out. What a great day to install a toilet. This is Sundays for dogs. We love Sundays. Sundays is human grade air-dried dog food. 90% meat, 10% superfoods, 0% synthetics. It is only one of two foods in the United States that offers complete and balanced nutrition with zero fillers. It's real food! Very rarely do you see such a short list of not only easy to pronounce, but familiar ingredients. Turkey, turkey heart, turkey liver, egg yolk, flaxseed, parsley. Can you believe that Bell and Izzy are 10 and 11 years old? They are seniors. They would be between the ages of 70 to 80 in human years. And over a year ago, we switched their diet to whole food ingredients. And we've never seen them happier, healthier, and more excited for mealtime. They are thriving. We all want our dogs to live as long as they possibly can and to be as healthy as they can while they're alive. Both Jasmine and I wish we had done this sooner and feeding fresh food is so easy now thanks to Sundays. They are on a mission to become the world's healthiest and convenient dog food. There's no prep, no mass, no refrigeration required. It's easy to store and it's easy to serve. Your dogs will devour it. I don't know who's more excited for feeding time, me or Bell and Izzy. Every time I open this bag, I give it the biggest sniff. Use code VanWives and receive 50% off your first order of Sundays. Only ships in the USA. Yummy. I find this so interesting. This is from the store here in Canada and this is from Europe. Weird, eh? Both schedule 40. They're the same product. They're just different. We're finally cruising. I think I said that like three times in this vlog and then we weren't. So hopefully I didn't jinx it again. That's the secret door that we built in the loft for this reason exactly. When we're building something or we need to run a new plug or any sort of work in the future, we have the ability to get up in the attic and run things around. So hey everyone, welcome to the spray foam room. Okay, we have all the lengths cut from the toilet exiting the house. All the angles on. Everything is ready. Now we're going to glue it together. It was like a practice round. Never glue before you know or it's hard work. And actually it doesn't call for glue. It calls for just caulking. So that's what we're doing. Follow the instructions. Yeah. The finishing touches. An insect screen to keep the bugs out of the house. Oh my God. Are you doing it here? It's just glue off like a rocket. Look at me. Like it's all over me. Like of course it's your own. My nose like. Oh my God. That caulking is wild. Don't talk to me about that spray foam. Spray foam I mean. Why? First day on the job. You are now for doing that. You should go get me a cloth and some water. Good job girl. Have you ever had spray foam in the nose anyone? It's gonna hurt. With the separate toilet it has a fan located inside of it and a vent that is attached to that. The air passes through and goes out the vent. And there are many ways that you can configure the vent. It can go straight up. They can have three different bends. Three nineties and 20 feet of pipe. There's also a conversion key to make it longer. So it's really easy and quite flexible compared to a lot of installations. With our last toilet it had to go on the back wall because the exhaust for the propane could only be, I can't exactly remember the numbers now. It was over a year ago. But they could only be a certain distance away. And if it wasn't condensation would build up and then it would be all gross. And you could only have 190. So no bends from where it came out of the toilet. If you had a bathroom that was on an outside wall it's pretty convenient. However a lot of tiny houses don't have that. Phase two everyone. And this is probably my favorite part about the separate toilet. X marks the spot. Diamond blade. You have to put a little muslin through it. Our big bit. Oh my gosh. Through to make sure for the joist is correct because you don't want to go through one of those. That's what you want to hear. Well everyone we may be peeing in the house tonight. No more peas in the middle of the night outside. Three times last night. This is a flexible urine drain. And the reason I'm so excited about it is because it doesn't limit how many peas you have. Our last toilet had a limit on how many peas you could go per hour. I don't know just after you spend 6k on a toilet. The old toilet. You feel like you should be able to not be limited. You could go pee every minute if you wanted. Every five seconds if you wanted. Obviously crystal goes to the bathroom three times a night. Hydrated club. And it gets better. This urine drain taps into our already existing drains where our shower, our sink and everything flows that way. Which is amazing. This way of getting rid of the liquid waste makes it feel like a real septic or toilet as you don't need to think about it other than putting vinegar down the line to keep it clean. Very low maintenance. Every off-grid toilet I think needs an explanation of how to use it. Like you go number two then give it three turns. So when someone comes over there's no explanation. They can just go to the bathroom exactly how they do at home. And we'll explain exactly how that is once this is installed and we can show you how it works. So with this toilet tapping into the already existing gray water is like life changing to me. I don't think I've ever owned a toilet that is tapped into some sort of system. Crystal's head's in the toilet. Swirly whirly. We want to test the urine drain for any leaks. First with water. That was a big pee. What do you call that plumber? That's a working toilet. Another reason why we chose this toilet is because you do not need any gas to run it and you need hardly any electricity. It actually is equivalent to a 30 watt light bulb. Are we done here almost? No more peeing outside looking at the stars together. Should we kind of like tidy up and put the bucket in and see how it goes? I love how you went over that, Culver. I'm going to miss it. I love the stars. Also pee outside sometime. 3M. Probably in the summer too. We love that. Or not in a polar vortex. Okay. The funniest thing is blizzard peas. Windy snowy freezing ice. Just like you can picture it. All right. This is temporary everyone. Ready? Purin. And super toilet. Morning. How many? We're almost at the perfect morning where we can go to the bathroom inside of our house. We just need to connect the last little bits which is under the house. I need to go down there, connect the pee drain to our main drain. And then we're good. You may use your toilet. Feeling great. Have fun. This is our 24 hour toilet review. This is how it works. So when you put your weight on the seat, the latch opens, then this toilet will divert number one and number two. But what we get into it is you lift the main part of the toilet. And they're held up by these little. Also as you sit on here, the bucket also spins keeping everything flowing. You put your bag inside of it. And that vent that we ran, that is air drying your waste. And yes, we will box that in. You go number one and then you give it a little spray with water and vinegar. And if you're wondering where this full bag goes, you can do different ways. You can bring it to your local landfill or if you have some service, just make sure they're aware of what is in the bag so they can properly dispose of it. And some people even compost it. After you go to the bathroom, the smell that you smell is transferred through the air. And because the air is being sucked out, you simply do not smell it. It's actually mind blowing. And that's what's really interesting about flushing toilets is that the smell is left in the air and that's why we have fans to suck it out because it can't be sucked through water. We'll see what it smells like outside. I'm very curious on that because like the Cinderella, it smelled outside. Like something was burning and not gonna lie, this is so funny. We didn't know what it was for the longest time until Tyler and Todd were like, we were at their dome and they were like, sorry, you can smell our poo. And I was like, I'm smelling my poo at my cabin. Like we didn't even clue into that. So far our 24 hour review is, we love it. It feels so good to go to the bathroom inside your own home especially with how many rainy days are coming up, the little things in life. I don't know if this is going to be our forever toilet here but it definitely is the right now toilet and we will of course always be 100% truthful with how it's going and keep you updated on our toilet situation as I know a lot of you are building alternative homes. Honestly, I think the toilet might be the hardest decision on what to do. Toilet talk. In our Q&A, we briefly explained about the customer service side of our experience with our old Cinderella toilet. Aside from our poor customer service experience and the lack of communication from the brand, we have come to the conclusion that this is not the toilet for us. And we just want to say that everything we're about to tell you is our experience. I would hope it's unique to us and that this isn't happening to anyone else. From the beginning, our toilet would work sporadically which means we had to deal with unincinerated waste. Often. Which would mean that over time this actually caused the toilet to not function even more. We reached out to the brand and had no response at the beginning. That means email, Instagram, anything that we could do, we tried. And once we finally did get a hold of someone and we were able to start troubleshooting, we replaced multiple parts on the toilet as it was under warranty. They sent us the parts and after doing the maintenance that the user manual states and replacing multiple parts, the toilet continued to function poorly. So time frame here, it's now been nine months without a toilet. I just want that to sink in with everyone because sometimes we'll say things so fast and I just want you all to feel imagine not having a toilet for nine months. We had a lot of patients were very kind and they finally issued us a replacement to swap ours for a new one. We were getting an exchange. They requested that we returned the toilet either by shipping it or by dropping it off. Shipping was very expensive and we had to cover that and we were already on our way home to Ontario for Christmas. So we decided we'll just drop it off. And then a month and a half had passed and we hadn't heard from anyone and so I reached out twice. And let me just put in perspective. So they not only have our 6K toilet but they also have our money now and we have no response from them. Once we did get ahold of them they proceeded to tell us that the toilet was now working. They replaced the Cadillac converter and they mentioned we sent a biohazardous toilet back as well as declining our exchange entirely unless we took down the content from our YouTube channel. This video. Meanwhile the toilet has been a hazard for us from the start. And the reason why it's hazardous for us is because there was many times we had to deal with unincinerated waste. And I never thought that they would take apart a broken toilet. That's being returned for a new one. And even if they were to take it apart I thought the company would have protocol on how to take apart broken toilet. Toilet. Yeah. And to be clear we didn't hand them a toilet full of waste. You all know us better than that. We would never do that. We emptied the ash. We cleaned it to the best of our ability. After an extreme amount of patience and countless hours trying to fix the toilet they offered us our old toilet back. At this point we had zero trust in our old toilet. We did not want to take it back. It would also start to work when we would fix some parts but then it would crop out right after. That was a pun that I didn't mean to say. That's the sporadicness. Sorry I'm laughing because there's so many good puns. Leave them in the comments. Someone said your Cinderella toilet dreams went up in flames. Something like that. As... Oh Bella wants it. As we are battling to get our promised exchange or a refund we received a lot of contradicting messages while we were on the phone. One of the confusing messages being that you are supposed to steam clean your incinerator toilet once a week. Which involves reattaching the toilet to the propane line which then we were told we should not be doing on our own and a gas fitter should be doing. Which we did do when we originally installed the toilet but to be able to clean it you need to take it off and so this is a lining up. After five... Like after taking it on and off of the propane line that would be very expensive to keep calling a gas fitter to literally do this. Also if that's part of the protocol now to steam clean your toilet once a week I have to get a gas fitter out here once a week. And by steam cleaner it's sounding less and less. That is just one point of how confusing the messaging is. But none of this really matters because they have declined a request for an exchange. They have our toilet and they have our 6K of money. Oh, 6K of money. They have our money. They have a lot of money. They have... That's wild. Like I have nothing. I felt like really small to be honest. Like what can I do? Also they also proceeded to tell us that if we wanted our old toilet back we would have to remove the content from our YouTube channel. We found their language manipulative and we found that that would be extremely disingenuous to ourselves and our audience. We would never do that ever and we've never been asked to ever do that. Right then when we got the email of we had to remove our video was exactly kind of like the closure I think we needed to basically say we want a complete refund. And the reason is is because we wouldn't want to lead someone astray. Yeah, it's going to end up in our videos. Like we show daily life here. At this point we were done being patient and we decided to put our foot down and demand a full refund. In the end the Cabin Depot issued us a refund not Cinderella the brand. The video they wanted deleted we said we think we got a dud. Pretty sure it's a dud. It was like so innocent. It wasn't like a... It was just like our toilet is a dud. You know, like that happens even with iPhones and apples like top leading seller, you know? However, we are taking this as a learning experience because we have now learned about two more toilets actually. We just installed a brand new one. And we've learned a lot along the way and there's a lot of pros and cons to the Cinderella toilet. So we're going to tell you what we've learned. Yeah, cool. If you have any questions leave them in the comments. Happy, happy, oh my gosh. We'll get back to you. Pros, we think the Cinderella toilet is a super unique innovative design. It's a very cool idea. And when it works, it's amazing. And I know some people who have them who do like them a lot. And it works no issues. 100%. You change the ash once a week or as necessary, depending how much you go. Unfortunately, our con list is fairly long but we're going to start with the... Price tag. The price tag. Overall, the toilet's very expensive. It's $6,000. It's $5,200, but then you have to buy the urinal. Right. It's an expensive toilet, big price tag. I told my cousin that and she was like, I'm going to buy myself a purse. I was like, okay. Also, you need to pay for the bags that go in the toilet. They aren't cheap as well. And if you're going pee in it too, that's a lot of bags you're using. It's not just for number two. Right. And the installation process can be expensive considering you need a professional gas fitter. And the pipe is super expensive. Also, keep in mind that you either need electricity to fuel all the pump. Oh my gosh. Our water cleansing cycle scares me every time. Also, keep in mind you either need fuel to run the toilet, which can get expensive or you need electricity and it's a high consumption. 240 volt. I'm not sure how often someone would need to replace parts on the toilet. In our case, it was a lot, but the parts are also expensive. There's also a lot of maintenance that goes along with this toilet, like going on the roof to sweep the chimney or going very high on a ladder if your toilet is installed on the back wall. And yes, this is okay for us right now, but it got me thinking in the winter, we have a metal roof. It's going to be super slippery. Also, when we get older, how are we going to do this? And don't forget about the weekly steam clean and hiring a gas fitter to keep coming out. There's also limited bathroom use with the Cinderella. I really don't believe that it's good for many people or full-time living. When you got to go, you got to go. I can't be waiting. No one wants to do that in your house when you pay 6K for a toilet. It's actually unbelievable. There is a urinal sold separately, so you could have another unit, almost identical in size to the actual toilet itself. So it's like having two toilets, and I don't think that's really ideal for tiny living either. And these toilets, I feel like are made for like an alternative living type of situation. We didn't have the space for her. Absolutely not. No. The liner that you insert into the toilet gets stuck often in the latch and then fill in your own picture of people. When it comes to maintaining the toilet, changing any parts, any of that, no one will come here and do that. We talked to the Cabantipo and Cinderella, and there is no one that would come here and do any of that. It's not a job you can hire out. Funny enough, that's actually something the propane people told us when getting this toilet. They were saying, just so you know, like we can't service you parts or anything or like... Service it. Service it. So yeah, that is another thing to consider. Overall, we believe that this toilet is not the one. No, like more than not the father. Overall, this toilet was not reliable for us, and we really hope that no one else has this experience. Yeah. We had to share. And I'm glad we did, especially after all the comments of how many people were going to buy it. So I hope I still do your own research, obviously. You could have a great experience, but we had to share ours. I'm just so happy we got a refund. And now we got a working toilet. Two birds. No stones. Kisses. What? Other. Two birds. I don't want to hit them. You're just digging us. We're going to be the toilet girls. Oh my god, okay, we're done here. Chris, we're not recognized as a toilet girl. Two touches are better. Where does it go?