Dr Bob

No, you certainly aren't. You dont make PCBs by burning plastic and if you did they wouldnt be in the atmosphere. They are heavy molecules so would settle on the ground hence remain in the environment. You are mixing up PCBs with Dioxins. Dioxins are even worse than PCB and are made by burning plastic incorrectly. They will not form if the right combustion conditions are met. Therefore well run incinerators are no problems. Badly run ones are. Dioxins too will not persist in the atmosphere but agglomerate and contaminate the soil etc. Dioxins are dependent on Chlorine being present in the plastic mix so burning PVC is particuarly bad. Off course burning anything that could contain plastic on a solid fuel stove could generate dioxins as the conditions are usually well away from the combustion temperatures needed for the optimum burning of the plastic.

Yea, and my comments haven't changed. Epoxies are hard rigid coatings that work by stopping oxygen and water getting to the substrate. They are excellent at the job due to their excellent adhesion to well prepared steel. They will not work well over soft single pack coatings. You may get some years out of them but its a poor solution.

Not a clue. My bus pass has now expired. The guy's next door system works fine - with the same webasto heater and a google nest. I just needed to know how to wire it and Tonka's picture shows that.

Ok, thats the heatmiser which looks totally different to the google nest. The nest has a red +ve and brown -ve feed which I will take from the boat circuits then has a wire out that is the 'call for heat' wire to the webasto. I cant see properly from the pic but there seems to be 3 wires from the square female connector - a red (so +12v and two others. I suspect one is black and goes to the A2 - so that is the 'call for heat' and the other one is brown and goes to the unmarked screw (or is it a -ve?) On my webasto switching box, I have a red, a brown and 2 blacks. Is it any of the two blacks I need to use? Edit Ah rather than just looking at the picture, I have now read the words (I am a muppet.....whadyou expect). Now clear. I'll try and wire it up on the weekend. Many thanks.

Yes, its a little square plug with the 4 wires. I want to ditch the controller and connect the wire that fires up the webasto to the google nest. Is it the black one?

I'm getting cheesed off with my Webasto control thingy giving me little control. Great, you can program it to come on 3 times a day but it never switches off. I'm going to fit a google nest but what wire do I need to connect for the 'request for heating'? Looking at the 4 wires going into the controller, there is one red, one brown and two black. I assume from looking at wiring diagrams the red is the +ve, the brown the -ve and the blacks then must be the request for heat wires. I am guessing if I put 12v down the black wire from the google nest, the webasto will fire up. The guy on the boat next to use wired his up that way but he's not around to work out which wire he used!

Worms are a good way to compost but only at low temperature. I think the max is around 45°C or maybe even less (<40°C). Once the temperature gets to the high 30's, the worms will start trying to get out of the box so not pleasant. If you tried to take the box over 40 ish then you'd be killing off the worms - so using the roof to get to 50 to kill off the pathogens aint goin' to work. I think Tiger worms are more temperature resistant but you still couldnt do it on the roof.

That all assumes land fill is the main route to dispose of our black bag waste. Unfortunately (or Fortunately?) it isnt. The majority of black bag waste goes to incineration these days and incineration costs are adjusted to match the landfill tax. This is the nub of the problem. The waste companies ie Biffa, Viridor etc dont want poo in their incinerators. It has less calorific value than the average so reduces margins. They happily take nappies because of the plastic content which is higher in calorific value than most of what they put in. They can stop getting the dog poo and some of the human poo (the 7Kg limit) via their private contracts...but its all about money. We deal with all of these waste handlers with our involvement in Plastic recycling and it is all down to margins.

Your water is coming from the water in the stuff you put in, or rain ingress afterwards. My experience of composting in the garden was that the heap always got too dry but I didnt have a clue what was needed. Water is needed as the bugs 'swim' in the water to get to the food. The compost has to be in the ball park of the right 'wetness'. Too dry and the bugs cant get to the food, too wet and the air doesnt get in and you start to get anearobic decomposition. In the lab we measure water content as per the test schedule using scientific meters. The way to do it in the field is to pick up a handfull of compost and squeeze it. If it drips it is too wet, if it doesnt drip it is too dry - ok extreme - but you are looking for something just in between. In practise, I never add water but if a box on the roof was looking a bit wet, I just leave the lid off for a few hours on a hot day. Its not really that important but you dont want the compost bone dry or swimming in water. Agreed. It becomes a very easy routine but with no need for any hardware maintenance.

I do agree with what you are saying but I am not suggesting everyone changes to separating toilets with composting on their boats. Exactly what you say will happen. The reason for posting on here is that there is so much aggression towards this toilet type that it appears as bad, illegal, the devil - and that needs balancing out. Those people who can compost successfully (and that is everyone if they put some effort into it) will have a much superior form of toilet for their boats. During last summers crawl around the network, we were moored up at Red Bull filling up with water when two old dears turned up. She was mid 80's, driving her 90 year old looking hubby with his trolly with cassette towards the Elsan. Their boat wasnt in sight so they must have been dragging this casssette for at least 15 mins (the speed they were going) and you could see it was a struggle. God knows how he would have lifted it up to the Elsan. Anywho, that didnt matter as the elsan was blocked and out of order. I suggested to Mrs Battleaxe they may want to consider as separating toilet. "Oh no, their illegal, you should be locked up". I swiftly withdrew. If anyone would benefit with this type of toilet it was those two, but no, poisoned by the words we here on here. What a shame!

It just shows the lack of inteligence in some people. What on earth do people think happens to their poo when the flush it down the loo. It biodegrades in the system further down the line creating CO2. That is nature. DUH! People seem to have forgotten about the carbon cycle. Plants decay and go to CO2. Living plants pick up that CO2 to help build new cells. That cycle has been going on for a few years.

Above is an extract from the ISO 16929 test method (EU standard) for the temperatures that have to be used when doing the fragmentation test for industrial composting. The temperatures are deemed by the standards body to represent what happens in an industrial Windrow compost heap (but that's another story). In our lab test we have units similar to the mini hot bins operating for the 12 weeks of the test at this temperature. Everything that is used by industrial composters is fully composted after 12 weeks at these temperatures - note most of them avoid anything man made like cups, plates, wet wipes even if they are stamped compostable. These temps CANNOT be sustained in a small uninsulated box. You can achieve them easily in an insulated 50-100L box but only if you feed them regularly ie twice a week. This is the basis of the mini-hot bin. Go to their web site and see how they work. They do work on boats but you need to feed them kitchen waste as you wont have enough poo to feed them so you then end up with loads of great compost - but what then do you do with it. Our 120L a year is fine for our pots but I guess with a hot bin you'd make over 300L a year. Keeping the temp up at these levels is easy with a hot bin. For us mere mortals trying to compost smaller quantities ie 20-40L in an uninsulated box, you will never achieve any real temperature rise, so using the boat roof as a radiator between April and October is the answer to get the material up to 50-60°C to assist in killing the pathogens (along with time) - see the humanmanure book. Hence the 6-9 months compost time depending on season. You also do need to get the water content right and turn it regularly - once a month - when its on the roof.

Mike, I dont know enough about the bugs to answer you question properly, other than they are everywhere. When we do a fragmentation test, ie to see if a bit of plastic packaging is compostable, we cut some 10cm pieces of film up and put it in something that is very like one of the mini hot bins, charged with 50L of 'feed'. The food is chosen to work the bacteria hard for the 12 week cycle. We mix up the feed - usually a blend of food waste, paper, card, and other stuff (ie a blend of green and brown) and put it in the bin. Always, 2-3 days later the temp is up at 60°C with the bugs chomping away. I dont know what the bugs are but they are always there. They are in the food. They are on the paper. We always put in 1-2Kg of aged manure (but less than 2 months old). This is all done accurately with a known recipe. It always gets to temp even without the manure. I guess it is nature. Leaves fall from the trees and biodegrade. That is the bugs in action. Keeping sourdough is not that easy as it takes a while to get going and you need to keep it at the right temperature. This 'reaction' is much quicker but yes, is essentially the same. The bugs are all around us.