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Newbie with smelly toilet


TodDog

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12 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

Now you have reminded me there was one on the very first hire boat I went on. I think they were actually made at Oulton Broad in Suffolk

The first hire boat I had was on the Norfolk Broads in 1976. It had a cassette toilet!

 

The second hire was on the Thames in 1978. That was pump out and I seem to recall the flush water in that got more and more disgusting as the week progressed.

 

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I can remember hire boats with recirculating pump out toilets where the toilet seat and the rim around the pan were white, but the inside of the pan was dark blue, so you didn't notice the flush water, which started off a matching blue at the beginning of the week, and ended up a rather unpleasant khaki-bluish colour a week later!

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22 hours ago, blackrose said:

Things don't always have to be used in the way they were designed if one uses a bit of imagination.


Maybe, but I do wonder if your imaginative installation of the toilet in the first place might have led to you having issues with smells. I'm not being negative about it, just pointing out that manufacturers (especially Thetford, who's products are very well designed) put a lot of effort into testing and development, and modifying a product in a freestyle way may result in these sort of unintended consequences.

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22 hours ago, blackrose said:

 

Things don't always have to be used in the way they were designed if one uses a bit of imagination.

 

25mm hose/ plastic funnel/ bilge blower/ plastic funnel/ 19mm hose/ hull skin fitting. (Duct tape bilge blower to funnels). I only used 25mm ID hose at the toilet end because initially I tried a tiny 25mm dia round computer fan in the end of the hose but that didn't work. A 3" computer fan with funnels didn't work either. Then I went for the 3" bilge blower 

 

The bilge blower efficiency is obviously reduced but it works well enough. It's not on for very long so won't overheat and unlike a computer fan it's noisy so you can't forget to switch it off afterwards.

Thanks. I wasn't sure if you had larger fittings than I had assumed or whether you were using a large fan with small openings. Given that the objective is to get a fair bit of ventilation that looks fine to me, if as you say, not the most efficient.

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16 hours ago, David Mack said:

I can remember hire boats with recirculating pump out toilets where the toilet seat and the rim around the pan were white, but the inside of the pan was dark blue, so you didn't notice the flush water, which started off a matching blue at the beginning of the week, and ended up a rather unpleasant khaki-bluish colour a week later!

I remember the same but with a white bowl. Truly disgusting by the end of a week... 😞

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12 hours ago, David Mack said:

Thanks. I wasn't sure if you had larger fittings than I had assumed or whether you were using a large fan with small openings. Given that the objective is to get a fair bit of ventilation that looks fine to me, if as you say, not the most efficient.

I wouldn’t go to less then 1 1/2” if using a 3” bilge blower, definitely not 19mm, better to go from 3” to 2” or 1 1/2” pipe work and fittings, far better air flow and fittings readily available without the use of duct tape.

Edited by PD1964
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29 minutes ago, IanD said:

I remember the same but with a white bowl. Truly disgusting by the end of a week... 😞

The Topcraft ones had a white or grey bowl while the Elsan ones had a blue one, but not as disgusting as the Elsan bucket and chuckets where the bucket was 3/4 plus full of mixed liquids, excrement and paper, all of which were on full view.

Edited by Tony Brooks
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1 hour ago, Tony Brooks said:

The Topcraft ones had a white or grey bowl while the Elsan ones had a blue one, but not as disgusting as the Elsan bucket and chuckets where the bucket was 3/4 plus full of mixed liquids, excrement and paper, all of which were on full view.

 

Could be worse. When I first visited my gran's house in what was then Yugoslavia in the late 60s, the toilet was a wooden shack on 3' stilts (with steps up to the door) attached to the side of the barn, half-way down the back garden. It had a hole in the floor, underneath which was a mound which looked like a volcano, if volcanos were a couple of feet high and made out of a mixture of excrement and toilet paper. Guess how pleasant that was in a boiling hot August? 😞

Edited by IanD
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6 hours ago, IanD said:

 

Could be worse. When I first visited my gran's house in what was then Yugoslavia in the late 60s, the toilet was a wooden shack on 3' stilts (with steps up to the door) attached to the side of the barn, half-way down the back garden. It had a hole in the floor, underneath which was a mound which looked like a volcano, if volcanos were a couple of feet high and made out of a mixture of excrement and toilet paper. Guess how pleasant that was in a boiling hot August? 😞

 

6 hours ago, IanD said:

 

Could be worse. When I first visited my gran's house in what was then Yugoslavia in the late 60s, the toilet was a wooden shack on 3' stilts (with steps up to the door) attached to the side of the barn, half-way down the back garden. It had a hole in the floor, underneath which was a mound which looked like a volcano, if volcanos were a couple of feet high and made out of a mixture of excrement and toilet paper. Guess how pleasant that was in a boiling hot August? 😞

 A composting loo, I am told they don't smell😀

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50 minutes ago, Tony Brooks said:

The Topcraft ones had a white or grey bowl while the Elsan ones had a blue one, but not as disgusting as the Elsan bucket and chuckets where the bucket was 3/4 plus full of mixed liquids, excrement and paper, all of which were on full view.

You've just brought back (unpleasent) memories of Scout Camp 'honey pot' duties ... a bucket and chucket usually in a small tent stinking and swarming with flies in the heat of summer....needing emptying every day or so...

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As a schoolboy I worked at the local camping and caravan side and we had a party of scouts come for a weeks camp, the first question is where can we dig the latrines. We told them to use the toilet block with flush toilets and hot showers like everyone else.

20 hours ago, jonathanA said:

You've just brought back (unpleasent) memories of Scout Camp 'honey pot' duties ... a bucket and chucket usually in a small tent stinking and swarming with flies in the heat of summer....needing emptying every day or so...

 

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45 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

As a schoolboy I worked at the local camping and caravan side and we had a party of scouts come for a weeks camp, the first question is where can we dig the latrines. We told them to use the toilet block with flush toilets and hot showers like everyone else.

 

Luxury... 😀

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  • 2 months later...

The OP has stated that the pong only occurs when the shutter is opened. The solution is obvious.  Review your pooing/weeing behaviour and reduce the open time to the absolute minimum, nanoseconds are important here.  Revising eating habits in light of the BSC may also be useful in this regard. HTH.

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D

1 hour ago, system 4-50 said:

The OP has stated that the pong only occurs when the shutter is opened. The solution is obvious.  Review your pooing/weeing behaviour and reduce the open time to the absolute minimum, nanoseconds are important here.  Revising eating habits in light of the BSC may also be useful in this regard. HTH.

Dont you have to hold the peddle hard down and watch the contents plop down into the tank. When friends of mine had guests they insisted on filling the bowl with water before dumping

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6 hours ago, Flat bottomed girl said:

I’m thinking of adding an aeration pump to the tank with a pipe down to lower levels of the tank, I have a large tank 970 ltrs with a 38 mm breather pipe. Adding oxygen increases aerobic bacteria . Just wondered if any one has done this before?

I added an air pump to push air in at one end, the vent is at the other end. But I put the outlet at the top, not the bottom, so it just pushes air over the top. It does help, but of course one consequence is that when I turn it on, there can be a right stink outside!

 

Another thing to try, which does seem to work for some reason, is to put some yeast down it. A teaspoonful of dried yeast, activated in tepid water with a bit sugar, left until it frothed then poured down the pan. Seems to eliminate the pong for one day, severely reduce it for day 2 etc but by day 4 it needs redoing. Still, it is cheap and easy.

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9 minutes ago, nicknorman said:

I added an air pump to push air in at one end, the vent is at the other end. But I put the outlet at the top, not the bottom, so it just pushes air over the top. It does help, but of course one consequence is that when I turn it on, there can be a right stink outside!

When I fit 'black' tanks, I install 2 vent outlets, one at each end and run the pipe of one to the port side of the boat and the other to starboard. Apart from on those rare still days, there is always passage of air through the top of the tank making oxygen available for digestion within. In everyday use you rarely get a smell escaping, but at pump-out time when it's disturbed you are likely to.

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3 hours ago, Bargebuilder said:

When I fit 'black' tanks, I install 2 vent outlets, one at each end and run the pipe of one to the port side of the boat and the other to starboard. Apart from on those rare still days, there is always passage of air through the top of the tank making oxygen available for digestion within. In everyday use you rarely get a smell escaping, but at pump-out time when it's disturbed you are likely to.

Yes I wish our builder had installed 2 vents, but I can see why he didn’t (practical space reasons). A small air pump is a reasonable substitute.

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