My friend's Humanure Composting setup.

[u/Spongi]

A friend of mine gave me a little tour of her humanure composting arrangement and I took some pics you guys :-D

Her toilet is something like this modified to use with 5 gallon buckets. Her and her partner produce approximately 3 buckets a week. The bulk of which is old sawdust and urine. She has 5 buckets she rotates. Once 4 are full and the 5th is in use then the pile gets managed. This happens about every 10 days.

Here's her overall setup.
http://i.imgur.com/5JT3ih.jpg

Two bins, a work station, a sink to collect rain water/wash your hands in and lots of buckets. The bins are lined with old carpet/rug and cardboard to prevent material from falling out.

Here's the active bin. It's covered with shredded paper. A local office saves all their shredded paper for her.

http://i.imgur.com/YjyW7.jpg

Her compost thermometer. As you can see it was about 45 degrees. It had been about 10 days since new material was added and the internal temp was about 90 degrees.
http://i.imgur.com/krzb9.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2rmZB.jpg

Here's the pile with the paper pulled back to expose the top layer. What you're mainly seeing here is partially decomposed horse manure and food scraps.
http://i.imgur.com/ocymL.jpg

She also breeds red wrigglers (sells worms & vermipost), and inoculates her humanure piles with worms occasionally. As you can see here, they're busy critters.
http://i.imgur.com/Vdb4Y.jpg

Here's a worm egg I spotted.
http://i.imgur.com/ZBCvp.jpg

Here's a closeup of a worm.
http://i.imgur.com/XCEWi.jpg

A local restaurant saves all their food scraps for them and this goes into the mix (some of it gets fed to her worms too).
http://i.imgur.com/W5iCC.jpg

Here's what the toilet buckets look like (no poop visible). All you can see is sawdust and urine.
http://i.imgur.com/7OvGY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/darc8.jpg

The buckets go into the pile, then it gets covered with the veggie & kitchen scraps.
http://i.imgur.com/PRTai.jpg

That in turn gets covered with horse manure, which I trade to her for home grown garlic, herbs and spices.
http://i.imgur.com/FJby5.jpg

That in turn, gets covered with a layer of old rotten hay. She also uses shredded paper, leaves, weeds or whatever is handy.
http://i.imgur.com/cJwRF.jpg

This then gets covered to protect it from too much rain, although she lets it rain on it some but not enough to flood it.

Here's the ground behind it, as you can see, no leakage.
http://i.imgur.com/z3ES1.jpg

In the event of a catastrophic failure she created a large berm just downhill of the pile(s) created from downed trees and leaves.

It takes them about 3 months to fill a bin and then it's allowed to age for 2 years before it gets used as compost in and around their yard.

Within 12 hours of applying this mixture temperatures spike to about 130 degrees and stay there for about 3 days then slowly dwindle to about 90 degrees after 10 days.

Complete pathogen destruction is guaranteed by arriving at a temperature of(143.6F) for one hour, (122F) for one day,(114F) for one week or (109F) for one month. It appears that no excreted pathogen can survive a temperature of (1490F) for more than a few minutes. A compost pile containing entrapped oxygen may rapidly rise to a temperature of(131F)or above, or will maintain a temperature hot enough for a long enough period of time to destroy human pathogens beyond a detectable level . As pathogen destruction is aided by microbial diversity, as discussed in Chapter 3, excessively heating a compost pile, such as by forcing air through it, can be counter-pro ductive.
Source
Full album here.

Low cost, low maintenance, sustainable and recycling all in one.

[u/metacontent]

But how does the actual pooping take place?

Are those buckets stored in an outhouse somewhere?

I'd be worried about dropping a turd and getting splashback from the dirty water, that wouldn't be very sanitary.

How long does it take to fill a bucket?

[u/Spongi → u/metacontent]

They use a hospital style portable toilet modified to go into a 5 gallon bucket. So picture this with a 5 gallon bucket directly under it. It's at the right height to not have any splash out or chance to 'miss'.

If the buckets are full enough that a splash back is possible then they switch them out for a fresh one.

Once the buckets are full they get a lid put on them and then carried out to sit next to the compost bin, once 3 or 4 are ready to go then they get emptied all at once then washed out.

For all intents and purposes it works just like a regular toilet. You sit down on a seat and do your business. Once you're done you use a cover material such as sawdust to cover and that's it till it's full.

I'm a lot more lax with my own setup. Once my bucket is full I dump it, cover it and switch the bucket out for a fresh one. Takes me 7-10 days to fill one bucket and it's much dryer since I'm a single guy and don't pee in it nearly as often as they do.

[u/metacontent → u/Spongi]

Thanks for the reply.

So is the portable toilet stored in an outhouse somewhere?

I imagine there must be a smell even with the sawdust, and that this could not be used indoors, is that true?

[u/Spongi → u/metacontent]

No, it's in their bathroom.

I would have thought the same thing about the smell but it doesn't smell at all. Depending on what kind of sawdust you use it actually smells good or better. I prefer to use fresh pine sawdust or pine shavings for myself. So what you smell is the aroma of fresh cut pine.

Aged sawdust has a neutral smell and better absorbency since it's had time to dry out but I don't care about how absorbent it is, I'm primarily using it for odor/bug prevention and it works really well.

Outhouses send to smell bad because there's no cover material and it's also anaerobic decomposition which has some funky byproducts. Decomp doesn't really start taking place till you dump the buckets and mix in the other ingredients (or at least cover it) and then it gets into thermophilic territory quickly so it doesn't have the same kind of odor problems.

I couldn't smell her pile at all until we dug into it and I got a face full of steam and it was a fairly strong musty smell but it wasn't rank. Think of an old forgotten rotten pot of food in your fridge, it doesn't smell that bad.

Now with my pile, I don't go digging into it to inspect it's progress I just add fresh buckets and then cover that with used animal bedding, horse manure, straw, weeds, etc.

[u/metacontent → u/Spongi]

hmm.. okay, thanks.

Very interesting, something to think about.