Off-Grid Mod Cons
There are a few key aspects of glamping that set it apart from traditional tent camping. Obviously, having a proper bed and bedding is a big one, but the provision of bathroom facilities is a close second; the promise of hot running water and a decent loo can be the thing that turns a reluctant camper into an eager glamper. For glampsite owners, however, managing the provision of toilet and washing facilities on an off-grid site can present some challenges.
If you’re planning to charge a lot for your glamping accommodation and this will cover the installation of flushing toilets and a connection to the sewers, or your own bio-digester on site, then it might be worth shelling out for. While there is nothing wrong with composting toilets, and they certainly don’t smell like people assume they might, some people can’t face the idea of them. Others prefer the familiarity, appealing to their sense of “civilisation”, so if you’re going to appeal to born and bred townies, flushing toilets might be worth the hassle.
The downside of flushing toilets is that they’re expensive to install and maintain compared to other types. They also cost money to fix unless you’re a plumber, while more off-grid solutions are much easier to maintain and fix yourself without any specialist knowledge, or needing to turn the water off, or having to deal with mains sewerage.
Composting toilets fall broadly into two types, separating and non-separating. In separating compost toilets liquids and solids end up in different places. This may be a soak-away, or pipes connecting to the mains waste, a bio-digester or filter system, or even a reed bed filtration system that can legally discharge filtered liquid waste products into a natural watercourse. Solids are dealt with separately, with some systems using a bag for collection and others having a larger receptacle with straw, shredded paper or sawdust that keeps the smell down. The waste is then removed and composted, buried, or fed into a bio-digester.
Non-separating compost toilets are the simplest, but they can be harder to manage on large scale. This type works best on a site where a hole can be dug for the season, the toilet unit set on top, and then moved after the season, and the hole filled in. You must check that this is suitable for your site in terms of proximity to watercourses, and that you can safely re-site the toilets each season as it can take up to two years for buried human waste to compost safely.
You can also provide chemical or portable toilets, but there is a cost associated with disposal of the waste or servicing of the portable toilets. This may be a good option for a pop up site where digging a long drop isn’t an option, and you have no way of managing separating compost toilets.
Disposing of compost toilet material – known as humanure – once it is composted is simply a matter of using it as normal compost on non-food crops. It takes one to two years to break down enough for safe use, depending on the type of composting toilet it came from, and the dry material used. Never use human waste compost on plants you are going to eat, but save it for your flowerbeds and fruit trees.
When it comes to the crunch, the easiest way of providing bathroom facilities on a glampsite is to offer hot running water for showers, but leave the plumbing at that. By providing biodegradable toiletries you can safely discharge grey water into the land or filter it further, perhaps reusing it for irrigating a garden. Solid waste can be composted and used as garden fertiliser or bio-digested in some systems, so there are options for all types of off-grid mod-cons.