I just read a popular blog in the survival genre and was asked to write some comments about off-grid water supply and waste disposal, based on my own experiences. My point here is not to find any fault with the blog comment, but rather to add something to it. I understand that one writes about what one has experience with. That’s all I’m doing, too.

The blog owner is an advocate (like me) of buying cheap land and living there, offline, in a cheap, old-fashioned RV. He acknowledges that a deep well and its accompanying pump are financially and logistically out of reach for most who are contemplating or living that lifestyle, and that this fact results in severe water rationing in many cases, as whether you are hauling water or using rainwater harvesting, or a combination thereof.

In this context, “Popular Blogger” (until now identified as PB) talks about using a pump sprayer as a shower, using water heated in a camp stove, or, in winter, the wood stove. PB presents the small manual sprayers, those that lack any type of hose, as ideal. He also believes in the sawdust toilet as a solution for human waste disposal. Of course, even such frugal use of water generates some greywater from showering, washing dishes, etc.; and PB recommends a “dry well” made up of a 55-gallon oil drum with holes drilled in the bottom, filled with rocks, and buried.

This makes a lot of sense and is a workable solution. In fact, I have used such a system, exactly as presented. I have also used similar systems that incorporated larger pump sprayers (which I much prefer), stovetop, or solar power (I have a 1.5 gallon black plastic pump sprayer that, filled with water and placed in the sun, heats up quickly enough for a good shower), as well as various types of RV and portable toilets. What I finally ended up with and used for a while was a system that far surpassed any of the previous ones in comfort and would actually suffice as a permanent solution.

The way it happened was I came across an old single width RV that needed to be moved from the RV park it was in so I was able to acquire it for the grand sum of $50. This trailer was packed with, among other things, a standard toilet in the bathroom. At the time I had been using an old portable toilet and while the portable was a viable solution, I quite enjoyed the prospect of having a standard flush toilet. So once I got the “new” abode in place and leveled it (relatively speaking), I used my old WWII era .22 bolt-action Marlin rifle to shoot some holes in the sides and in the bottom of a 55-gallon drum, then sunk into a previously dug hole. Instead of filling the drum with rocks like in the PB drywell, I left the drum empty and filled the hole around it with rocks, like a kind of leach field. This, I covered with plastic sheets and a layer of soil. I then ran a sewer line into the drum from my newly purchased toilet and started using it, flushing it by pouring about 3 gallons of water directly into the bowl of a previously filled mud bucket* from my rainwater catchment tank.

I was happy as a lark for a while, but then decided to kick things up a notch by placing a 55 gallon drum on a pile of cinder blocks outside the (exterior) bathroom wall behind the toilet, running a line from the drum to the doorway of water from the toilet and direct the water from a gutter to the drum. Oh, what luxury! I no longer had to unload with a bucket of poured water; Now I had a real flushing toilet, with the little handle and all! The only thing he had to do in terms of maintenance was if there was a long period of no or little rain, he had to go to the creek and get a pitcher of water to pour into the tank before he could flush. Or, more often than not, I would discover this when the water actually ran out, causing no action when I pulled the handle. In such cases, I usually just go ahead and pour the water directly into the container as before, after returning from the creek several hours later (surely you don’t expect me to go to the creek and not fish!).

During one of those dry spells, reaching to pull the handle and finding it didn’t work, I began to wonder if I should use the water I had allocated for washing dishes instead of making the trip to the creek. Unfortunately, this would require putting off doing the dishes for another day or two, and I no longer had clean dishes or paper plates. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I could use the water for both purposes! My goodness, the fact that the water was used to wash dishes does not preclude its use to flush a toilet!

Until now, he had been letting the greywater run off onto the patio floor, using the greywater drain pipe already installed on the trailer. I showered in the tub using my pump sprayer, occasionally taking a shower when it rained enough that I was flush (no pun intended) with water; used water bottles and the standard sink for washing hands, brushing teeth, and shaving; and water heated in a pot to fill the kitchen sink to wash the dishes. All that gray water, going to waste. Enough of that; I found my hacksaw and proceeded to cut the drain line to the kitchen sink and toilet, plugging the end that went outside and placing a mud bucket under the stopper that came from the sink/basin to catch the water that came out thence. I installed a 55 gallon plastic drum outside at the end of the greywater line, to collect the water from the tub. All this water, I used to flush the toilet.

This worked fine. In fact, it worked so well that I started having problems with mosquito larvae growing in the now infrequently used toilet supply tank, as well as water overflowing and running under the trailer, so I eventually removed it entirely and rerouted the outlet of that gutter to a new fish pond. But that’s a story for another day.

Of course, I flushed the toilet again, but that’s not a big deal, is it?

* 5-gallon plastic pail, so called because “drywall mud” is sold in such a pail.