So after part one, I’d removed the old toilet, glassed up the two thruhulls, and removed all the old hose. Now to put stuff back together again!
As mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I’d decided to go with another composting toilet. I’ve covered my reasons pretty thoroughly in those two posts so I won’t reiterate them again. One thing that was quite exciting (to people who get excited about such things, anyway) was that since the last time I’d looked into it, there seem to be quite a few more options on the market.
I’d gone with a Nature’s Head on Gudge – this time round I went with an Ogo.
So why the change? Well although I DID really like the NH, I always felt there were things that could be improved on it. The Ogo is smaller and better looking (at least to my eyes), looking more like a small box rather than a giant plastic throne ala the NH or Airhead.
Other factors include it having a better agitation mechanism and the best thing of all – a light that comes on when the pee jug is full. I can’t believe that NH hasn’t added one of these as it’s very very easy to overfill the pee jug, which is a real pain, especially since it always seems to happen at night. And you know, the thing you REALLY want to do at 2am is turn all the lights on and get moppin’ up some piss.
The things that may turn out to be a pain are that the agitator is electrically driven (so fancy!) and so it remains to be seen how long it lasts and that the solids bucket is a lot smaller than the natures head, meaning it has to be changed more often. I could often get 2+ months on the NH, so it will be interesting to see how long the Ogo lasts for.
I am going to do a full review of the Ogo in a few weeks, complete with the pictures I took when I tore it down.
With the cupboards painted and the old manky head/hoses removed, installed the Ogo was as simple as screwing it down, connecting the power, and venting the fan.
I had a lucky break, in that the ceiling of the head had a 3″ hole in it already for a dorade box, so I just bought a 3 inch funnel that went down to the size of the hose and wedged it in there.
Then, I had to connect the power. Sooner has a ton of wires run everywhere (more on that in a later post), so I found one that didn’t seem to go anywhere, followed it up to behind a light and bingo! Unused circuit that I could wire in to the panel and the Ogo (notice the wire nuts in this pic. Lots, lots more on that later).
And with that – it was all finished. I had to rerun the shower track on the ceiling a bit to make it fit around the vent but that was just a quick hour of swearing and getting bits of ceiling in my eyes.
It’s worth noting that I was also tempted by the cuddy, which looks similar to the Ogo, but is cheaper and has a hand agitator. However, it currently has a 17 week lead time so uh, that was off the table.
