 Look, we need to talk. This just isn't working out for me anymore. The thing is, I found somebody new. That, now, don't argue with me because I've made up my mind. And you don't need to worry because there's a lot of life left in you and somebody out there is going to want you. But, you know, I just have to do what's right for me and move on. Happy Sunday, everybody. It's Robin with Creativity RV and I'm going to get right to it today because I'm going to cover a whole bunch of stuff about composting toilets and my new composting toilet install in not one, but two different RVs. One is a truck camper, which has a really small footprint. And the other one is a fifth wheel. I'm going to tell you why I chose to swap out my regular RV toilets for composting toilets and about the new composting toilet on the market that absolutely sealed the deal for me to make that choice. I'm going to tell you exactly how composting toilets work, how much they cost. I'm going to show you both of the installs and then I'm going to answer a bunch of questions that you might have if you're in the market for a composting toilet or this is all new to you. Now, if you follow my channel, you might know that I have a fifth wheel that's in storage on a rural property. That's where I am now. But, normally, I travel inside of a truck camper. Well, I came back to visit Colorado with my family and I decided to stay in the fifth wheel for what I thought was going to be like a week. But then gas prices went up and then I had the forward death wobble on my truck and I've been waiting for a part. And it's kept me here for a few weeks inside of my fifth wheel, but there was one problem. There was no dump station anywhere nearby. I had a composting toilet before. You may have seen that video about four years ago. But when I sold the rig it was in, I got another RV with a regular toilet and I thought I might go back to a composting toilet. But honestly, I wasn't crazy about the one that I had. There were a couple things about it that just drove me nuts. But one night I got online and I started looking around and I found the coolest new composting toilet that I thought wouldn't even be available here because it looks very European. It's sleek and it has a small footprint and it has a bunch of components that the regular composting toilets that I've seen in the US didn't have. It turns out that this toilet is made in the USA. It's made in Ohio, but it was only available in Europe until just recently. And the more that I looked at it, I was totally sold. It's a lot easier to deal with. It's a lot easier to mix the compost and easier to dump. And I'll show you all of that when I go through the install. So let me tell you why I decided to invest in composting toilets in both of my rigs. Now I'm a full timer. I live in my RV all year and my truck camper is pretty small. It's only got a 30 gallon water tank and it has really small outside storage compartments. Well like the first rig that I got a composting toilet in, I hated wasting the water in my fresh water tank to flush the toilet. You know RV toilets are not like traditional household toilets. They don't flush. What they do is they rinse and every time you use it, you're just letting your fresh water literally go down the drain. When I have a composting toilet, my water lasts me at least 30% longer. It feels like maybe 50% longer. So for me as a boondocker who's not getting off the road anytime soon, it seemed totally worth it to me. Plus I don't have to take up one of my two little storage compartments to store all of the RV hoses anymore and I don't need to buy and store chemicals and, and this is the best part, I don't have to search for a dump station every week or every two weeks. You know, I love living on the road, but searching for a dump station every time I break camp gets old. And in the fifth wheel, like I said, I'm really far away from a dump station so I can't just hook up a poop case, you know, and pull it behind the truck, which by the way is gross. And I pulled one behind my truck once on a dirt road for a mile and the wheels fell apart. Anytime you dump your tanks, you have to bend down and hook it up and all the waste flushes out and then you have to rinse it and hope it's rinsed before you put it back inside your RV and it smells and the whole thing is really gross and composting toilets are not. They're great. I'll go over more of that when I get to the questions section of this video. Okay, let me tell you about the composting toilet that I chose. It's called an OGO toilet. Isn't it cute? Like I said, it's so much sleeker and so much more European looking, but that's not it. The guts inside of this thing and the design is so much better than the last one that I had. Here's a picture of me with both of the toilets for my two campers uninstalled and you can see how they compare in size. If you have a van or a tiny house or a cabin or just an RV with a small space for the toilet like my truck camper, the OGO is a good choice. The other ones wouldn't even have fit in my truck camper and my last composting toilet had what they call a spider wheel on the outside. That's one of the reasons they take up so much space. The composting toilet might be this big, right? But then on the side, they have this big metal wheel. So you're supposed to turn it at every use and I'll explain that to mix up the compost and it doesn't want to turn and it gets hard and it does not mix it up well. I was over that. Now you can see here in the OGO, it's totally different. There is no mixing apparatus on the outside of the toilet. It's all already inside the bin. It's electric. So when you use it, all you do is touch a little button and the compost mixes up and it mixes all the way around and you don't have to do anything. It's actually kind of fun. It's like a stand mixer when you look at it mixing the compost around. And with this one, it's a lot easier to actually remove the compost and remove the urine jug. And I'll explain that in a second when I tell you how it all works. And Genius OGO put a sensor inside of the urine jug. So a red light comes on when it's almost full and I'll tell you, you might say to yourself, I am never going to pee so much that my urine jug overflows, but you will. If you have a composting toilet, I have to tell you that when Doug was traveling with me, I was sleeping one night when I had the composting toilet and from the other room I hear this. And I was like, what happened? What happened? And he got up to pee and the pee came out all over the floor and all over his feet. And that's what happens because if you lose track of when you've last dumped it, that can be a problem. Not with the OGO. Check out this picture. This is my actual light on my toilet lit up telling me it's time to empty it. And bonus, when I do, there's actually a cap for the urine jug. My last composting toilet did not have a cap. So if you wait too long and you're trying to take it out to dump it, it sloshes and gets all over the outside of the jug or all over you. Let me tell you how much a composting toilet costs. The OGO, which is the one that I got, is $11.50. So it is an investment, but for me, not having to go to the dump station and not having to get more water and not having to buy the chemicals is worth it. I was spending probably $50 a month on a dump station. Which is just a hassle to find and then you have to go and actually do it. So my composting toilet will pay for itself in about two years. It's up to you. It's individual if it's the right thing for you. OGO is about the same price as everything else on the market, but they were super nice. I contacted them and they are giving our viewers $50 off. So look down below. You'll see a link and a coupon code. So how does a composting toilet work? Well, all composting toilets work by separating the liquids from the solids. And no, it does not smell at all. Separating the liquids and the solids stops that from happening. So you're going to see two compartments in any composting toilet. You're going to see the urine compartment for the liquids and the compost department for the solids. It's not hooked up to plumbing in any way. So like I said, you're not using your water and you don't flush it. And because it's not connected to the plumbing, it's super easy to install. If you look at the top of my composting toilet, you'll see that there's two different compartments. The pee goes in the front and goes right down into the jug. Now, if you're a dude, you might be wondering how this works for you. All composting toilet companies that I know of recommend you sit down and let it go right into the front. Like just dangle your dangle, not a big deal. Then when you're ready to do the two, you open up the back chute, which is really easy. You can see there's a pole section here on the OGO toilet. And that opens up your access to the composting bin. See back in the bin here where it looks like there's soil. That's the composting medium. You can use a couple different things. I choose coconut core. It's inexpensive. It's easy to find. It's easy to store. So it looks like soil already. And you just put it back into the bin, do the business. And with the OGO genius, you just hit a button and it mixes it up. And again, no, you don't see it and it doesn't smell. In the back of the OGO toilet, there's a little tiny fan that's already pre-installed. It's low voltage. You can barely hear it. And it just has air circulating in the back bin. So it keeps the compost just the right moisture level. And they do have an exhaust vent where you can put a hose and drill a hole and actually have the air from inside the bin exhaust out. But I actually chose not to do that. And I didn't want to cut a hole in my RV. And I'm not really concerned about the moisture. The people at OGO told me that the overhead fan in RVs is more powerful than their fan. So if I have that, I should be good. That hose came with the toilet. So if I decide later I want to do it, I can totally do that. But I don't think I will. I mean, so far it's working great without installing that. And the OGO is already set up to do a urine diverter if you want to do that. And basically that just means you don't have the urine jug. That's gone. And instead when you pee, it goes down a tube into, let's say, your black tank. And then you could just dump it from there. If you're going to be in one place for a long time, that sounds great. You don't have to take the jug out anymore and dump it more on that when I get to the questions section. Now, we were going to do a urine diverter in the fifth wheel, but we didn't have one tool that we needed. I'll show you that inside of our install, so we just did it the regular way like we did in the other camper. It only took us about five easy steps to install each of these toilets. The first thing you do is you remove the little plastic caps on either side of the existing toilet, and then you take a wrench and undo the bolts. Be sure that you've turned off the water source to your existing toilet before you remove it, of course, more on that in a second. You want to have a towel handy and maybe some plastic bags. Then you lift off the old toilet, you unscrew it from the existing RV water source. And quick note here, on my first RV that I installed a composting toilet in, there was actually a valve right there on the toilet on the line. So I expected that in these rigs and there wasn't a valve. So we had to run to the hardware store and get some caps. Here's a picture of the cap that worked for my toilets. It was just a standard one inch cap. The next thing you do is attach the composting toilet to the floor. Now, if you have a tiny house or a cabin or something, easy peas, you just attach it. If you have an RV, you have to decide what you're going to do with the existing flange, which is the black ring that goes around the top of your black tank. You can see mine here. We could have gotten rid of that and just kept the hole and attached the toilet. But I wanted to keep my flanges in both of my rigs. So if I ever sell it and the new owner doesn't want a composting toilet, it's no big deal. Literally, you just take off the composting toilet and put the old toilet back on. But because I kept the flange, the new composting toilet wouldn't have sat on the ground evenly. So what we did is we cut out a little piece of plywood that matched the base on the bottom of the toilet, cut a circle for the flange, put that underneath the toilet, attach the toilet to the ground, and then we went to attach a 12 volt power source to it. Now remember, the OGO mixes up your compost. It's just the touch of a button and that little red light comes on to tell you if your urine's getting full and it runs the little fan. So it does need a very low voltage power source. If you don't have a 12 volt source, they also sell an adapter where you can just plug it into the wall. Now we saw a power source right behind my toilet, but when we went to actually connect the power, there was no power back there. My Lance truck camper is a 2008. I don't know what people have done and undone over the years, but it was no big deal. We just pivoted and we got our power source from a supply underneath the bathroom sink. You can see my friend here is hooking it up to the power. That's it. So we removed the old toilet, we put in the new toilet on a platform, we attached it to the power, made sure the water was shut off, of course. And now look, when you hit the button, you can see the gizmo turning. That's where the compost is going to go. So then we went and did the same thing with the fifth wheel. But we were going to do a urine diverter on this one, and that's where we ran into our only problem with this install. So like with the last one, we turned off the water source, we unscrewed the old toilet, we removed it, we put the new toilet on a platform, and we were planning to not use the urine jug and just put in the urine diverter. But unfortunately, my water line was too far forward for the urine diverter to match up. The urine has to go into the black tank. If we have brought the right tools, we could have gotten rid of that water line, but we didn't have it. So it was really no big deal. We just installed it the way we did the other one, except on installation number two, we didn't have another plug to plug the black hole. So what we did is we just cut a little circle out of some sheet metal and then glued it down to the top of the flange with some silicone, no smell, easy peas, and then we attached the ogre onto the floor, connected it to a 12 volt source, and then I got to fill it up with the compost. Now you can buy bricks of compost, which is what I used to do, but this time I got a bag of the ogre compost because it's already partially pre-moistened. So you just pour it in and you add about a glass of water, you can see me doing it here, and you press the button and it mixes it all together. And as you do it, you can see it fluffing up, you want the compost to go up to about the metal bar, and that's it. And then it's ready to use. Now let me answer some other questions you might have about composting toilets. Again, no, it doesn't smell at all. If you have been or lived in an RV, you might know that if you put up the toilet lid and run the overhead fan, that fan will pull the reek from your black tank up into your house and it is disgusting. That is something that I learned when I was first on the road. You always keep the lid shut. Well that doesn't happen at all with a composting toilet because remember, the black tank is now capped off. One time in the last two weeks, I smelled soil for a second, but that was nothing but the coconut core, which is inside of the composting bin. And yes, you can put toilet paper into the composting bin and you don't have to buy that crappy expensive RV toilet paper anymore, but I choose not to because I want to empty my compost as infrequently as possible. And if you put your toilet paper in there, it does fill up faster. So I just put my toilet paper in a bin, you do what's right for you. Okay, now the big question. What do you do with the stuff inside the toilet? Well, there's two components, right? The liquids and the solids. For the liquids, the urine, you either have the urine diverter or for most people, you just take your jug outside and you dump it. Look, I said this in my first composting toilet video. Guys pee outside and animals pee outside and I feel like I should get to put a little bit of my pee outside. It's totally fine. It's legal. And I camp with a lot of boondockers and I have to tell you it's so funny in the morning because everyone's all sleeping. You look outside and you just see people walking out with their urine jugs and you're like morning. It's totally normal. Now for the solids. Like I said, you want to dump it about every 30 uses. All you do is you pull out the composting bin and you dump it upside down into a trash bag. Like I said, this is a lot easier with the OGO than it was with my last brand where when you lifted up the lid, it hit the wall and you really couldn't get it out easily. OGO is totally different. So you just take it out and you dump it into a trash bag and you put it in the trash. Now you might be asking yourself, is that legal? Well, yeah, in most places it is. Of course, it depends on the local municipality and what their rules are. Most municipalities say it's fine to put it in the landfill as long as it's in a plastic bag and it's tied off. And look, everybody, don't dump it on the ground. I know there's going to be people out there that say that they just put their compost material on the ground because it's natural and it's going to turn into compost. That does take a year to happen until then there are pathogens in it and it's against the rules on all public land and against the law in most states. It's just as easy to put it in a bag and take it to the trash. If you have a composting bin on your property, like I do here where my fifth wheel is, you can put it right in the composting bin. No big deal. You dump it in there. You come back a year later. All the pathogens are gone and then you have compost to feed your trees. Now, you might be wondering if you still have to go to the dump station to dump your gray water. Well, it's kind of a gray area. You can totally, of course, keep your hoses and go to a dump station and dump your gray water. But on most public land, they allow campers to throw out like dishwater and shower water. And if you don't have a black tank with fecal matter coming out of the same hose that your gray water is coming out of and you're not dumping 30 gallons of water like you do when you have a black tank onto the ground, it's really okay. A few years ago, when I had my first composting toilet, I did a video on evaporating my gray tank and I'm planning to get back to that. I have some new ideas on how to evaporate. So just as I go along, you know, when I do the dishes, when I take a shower, whatever, I'm going to just evaporate the water out. I am just kicking myself for not doing this sooner. I look back at the last three years where I had a regular RV toilet and I just wasted so much time and so much money going to those dump stations. I don't think I'm going to go back anytime soon. I have not used the one in the truck camper yet. I'll do a special side video for my patrons about how that one's going. But overall, I'm loving it. And like I said, if the Ogo was attractive to you, they did give us a $50 coupon. Again, the link is below. I'll see you guys next week. Until then, I hope you're all doing well out there. Have happy travels and be free.