Seperett Waterless toilet - a review

If you follow my blog, you'll remember a couple of months ago that we bought a waterless toilet.  We've had the toilet installed now for about 6 weeks and I thought it was about time to let you know how its going.  So here is our review, which is honest and written completely independent of the company we purchased from or the producer of the toilet.

So, after much consideration of the various waterless toilet options that would work for our home, we opted to buy the Seperett Villa 9000 from a company called A better way to go.  Before we purchased the toilet (and all of the supporting materials), I spoke to Carol at A better way to go on the phone.  Her customer service and product knowledge was brilliant, and she was able to give me the reassurance that the product would work well for our situation and was also able to give me a quote for exactly what I wanted, including freight, within the day. 

After ordering, our loo, the two Aerobins and the consumables we ordered arrived within two days.  All of the boxes were light and easy to carry and would have fitted into a station wagon, but took two trips in Stu's small hatchback.

Toilet in a box!

With much excitement, we unpacked and played with the unit to work out how it all worked.  In a nutshell, the toilet has a section at the front that connects to a hose, this is where liquids go and can be 'flushed' with a cup of water when needed, or a 'bioblock' can be placed in there to prevent urine salt build up.  The back section has a 'privacy flap' which is blue and opens up automatically when you sit on the seat.  Below this flap is where the bucket goes, and all solid material goes into the bucket.  The toilet has a small fan inside which operates constantly to remove all smells and moisture from the inside of the toilet.  The toilet plugs into a regular powerpoint (using an included adaptor as the plug is European) and has two speeds, one for regular use and two for big smells! :)

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The toilet out of the box.

The top of the toilet opens up (and locks open) to reveal the bucket and fan at the back.  You can see on the top the blue privacy flap, the urine diverting section and the mechanism that causes the flap to open.

We installed the toilet ourselves over two days.  It would have been much quicker except that we were installing it in the position of our existing toilet and because this toilet doesn't have a cistern, we had to repaint the room.  We also had to buy a few extra plumbing connectors (which required a trip to town).  If you're going to install one, plan ahead so you have a spare loo in the meantime!

The written instructions that came with the toilet were pretty vague, but the video on the website is very handy, though you do need to have a bit of a clue when it comes to renovations and some ability to think creatively for the installation.  A few things were involved.  First we had to remove the existing toilet and work out a way to seal the pipe that the waste used to go into.  We chose to divert our urine to the septic tank (there are a couple of other options for urine though if you should choose), so used a converter to reduce our 100mm pipe to a 25mm pipe and connected this through the existing hole in the floor into the existing plumbing.  As we have very limited under floor access, this was fiddly and involved some bad language, but not too hard.  The toilet also has to have a pipe for the exhaust fan to blow through.  We piped ours directly out of the back wall and then away on the outside of the house.  Not hard again, but you have to be brave about cutting big holes in your walls :)

The power plug is simple, though as with most toilets, we don't have a powerpoint in there, so it is still currently running on an extension cord - we will eventually have a powerpoint installed so we can get rid of the extension cord.  And the final part of installation is screwing the unit to the wall or floor - we chose the floor as it was easier and felt more stable.

Having installed the toilet, our family were all very keen to be the first to use it!  I won! It is mostly like using a normal toilet without the flush, but with a few differences.  First of all, when you sit on the seat, it lowers an extra couple of centimeters as it pushes down the button to open the privacy flap.  This makes a 'clunk' sound and feels a bit off putting until you get used to it.  I find I need to sit just a little further forward than usual in order to make sure that urine goes in the front and not in the bucket (you don't want a bucket full of wee!).  Poo and toilet paper go in the back without trouble, and except for the lack of a 'splash'  feel pretty normal.  Unless you want to, you don't have to see the solids in the back, so there is no need to check out what others have done in there, the privacy flap closes over neatly when you stand up again.

For girls, the toilet runs pretty much as normal.  For kids and men, its a little different.  The privacy flap is just that, for privacy only, and not watertight.  So if men stand and wee haphazardly at the toilet, you can end up with a bucket full of wee.  There are two problems with this, first it fills the bucket quicker and impacts on the composting later, and second it causes more smell.  So we encourage men to sit for everything.  Our rule is that if you want to stand you go water a tree!  For kids, the toilet comes with a children's seat which easily clips onto the regular seat and directs wee and poo from smaller bottoms into the right spots - my kids cottoned on very quickly, but visiting kids need a hand and if you had a very little one, it might be worth leaving the seat on and removing it for adults rather than the other way around.

Smell from the toilet is most people's concern.  It says on the website that it doesn't smell, but to be honest, we were all a little dubious.  But truly, it does not smell!  The fan takes away all smells, not only from the toilet, but the whole room.  We have our kitty litter in that room too, and now never even smell that.  The fan literally takes the smell directly out, so even entering the room straight after a bloke has been in there for his daily sit, there is nothing to smell!  Only once have I smelt it, and it was a really hot day.  We simply bumped up the fan to level 2 for a while and it was better in no time.

As far as I'm concerned there are only two things I don't like about using the toilet.  First, the seat is flimsy plastic and I don't like it!  You can change the seat, but it is a little tricky to get one that will fit right and press the button for the privacy flap.  The only other thing I don't like is a real girly problem - that time of the month when things get a bit messier.  But I deal with it, and just use a cup of water to 'flush' the front of the toilet when I need too.

Toilet installed, complete with instructions for use on the wall, kids seat and 'wee wipes'.

Oh, and guests sometimes are a little frightened of the new loo, so I put up some simple instructions that I wrote for them.

As a family of four, I find that the bucket needs emptying about every two and a half weeks.  Though it may be less often when the boys are at school, Stu is at work and we don't have all of the holiday visitors we've had recently.  Emptying is really very simple.  The toilet comes with 3 buckets and 2 lids and you use biodegradable bags in the buckets (though I may move away from these and just use a sheet or two of newspaper in the bottom once I'm out of bags).  Once I know the bucket is full, I prepare a new bucket and grab a lid.  Then it is simply a matter of opening the toilet and popping the lid straight onto the full bucket.  Honestly, you don't even need to see the contents.  The lid can be clipped on and the bucket removed.  I use this opportunity to give the inside and outside of the toilet a thorough clean with some of my homemade orange cleaner and a soft rag.  The whole toilet is made from plastic, so you don't want to use any abrasives, but it is really easy to clean and I feel like it is actually staying cleaner than our old toilet.  The new bucket and bag are then put in and it is ready to go.

Meanwhile, the full bucket needs to be emptied.  We opted to buy two of the Aerobin composters at the time of purchase, to save on postage, and also so that we have a new one to go onto once the first is full (the humanure needs a 12 month composting period before it can be spread around the garden).  Emptying the bucket is easy.  You carry it to the compost bins, and then before you remove the lid of the bucket, gather up the handles of the bag and open the compost heap.  Then simply remove the lid and quickly deposit the (untied) bag into the compost.  There is a moment there where you get a lovely fragrance of a couple of weeks worth of poo, but it is over quickly. 

Our two Aerobins look neat and unobtrusive in the garden.

And that's it!  In about 18 months, we'll have our first load of composted humanure to spread around under our trees, and we will have saved heaps of water and helped out our sick septic tank :)

We are very happy with our new toilet, and are happy to answer any questions you might have, ask away!

PS. If you use a lot of toilet paper, the bucket will fill very quickly.  Everyone in our house has cut back on toilet paper, and as the only girl, I've made up some cloth 'wee wipes' after seeing the idea in a Grass Roots magazine.  These are used for me and also for if there are any drips on the seat from the boys.  Since having them, our toilet paper consumption has dropped heaps and the bucket fills slower.  But of course, these are a very personal choice.