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[–]mikipika 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Until now, it never occurred to me that I needed to know these things about poop. What to do when it gets below 50? Do you have to keep the bins above 50 degrees the whole year?

[–]yetanotherone_sigh[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The indoor composting toilet using the peat moss is the above 50 degree model. To use it, you'd put in a tiny bathroom inside your cabin and just make sure it stays warm enough. It doesn't smell bad.

The bucket'o'poop with the humanure and sawdust is different. It generates its own heat as the sawdust decomposes, and the whole thing takes off and kills pathogens as the poop is digested. Basically you can do this in any climate at any temperature. If it freezes solid in the winter, it will take off as the weather warms up.

That leads into a totally different topic, but a friend of mine is trying to harness the heat of decaying compost to heat his greenhouse in the winter. You can run a coil of garden hose through the pile and slowly pump water through it. The water picks up heat. Then you empty the water into a tank inside your greenhouse. You continually circulate this in a loop. It uses a small amount of energy to run the pump, but it will keep a greenhouse in normal temps all winter for the price of a few bales of hay.