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Hello, all! I'm new to this forum, and looking for a place to ask a plumbing question.
My husband and I live in western Oregon, and plan to move out of the city to a place in the country, to be closer to his work, and to allow us to set up a more self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle. Another couple will likely share our land and costs. I grew up in the country and have been studying and preparing for this move for some time now. This has included considerable study of greywater recycling/re-use systems, rainwater collection, and composting toilets. Among many other references, I've read the Humanure Handbook, and several of Art Ludwig's books on greywater, water storage, etc. I have shared what I have learned and concluded with my husband and our friends, and I thought we were pretty much "on the same page" with regard to plans, including planning to use composting toilets. We also plan on building our own cob homes. (Cob is as earth-building technique, very friendly to owner-builders.)
We recently looked at a promising property which, unlike others we have seen so far, has an old house in place, suitable to provide shelter for us while we build our cob homes. It has a flush toilet, of course, plumbed to a septic tank. We were pretty excited about the property, talking about it over beers after seeing it. I casually mentioned that one of the first things we would do is pull the flush toilet and set up the composting toilet, and to my surprise, I was greeted with much resistance. The guys seemed to think that this was a low priority detail that would take too much effort and time, and should be postponed for a year or several until we have built our cob houses!
My specific question for you all, especially any people with expertise in plumbing and septic systems, has to do with replacing a flush toilet, currently plumbed to a septic tank, with a composting toilet.
From all I've read, heard, and seen, this appeared to be a very straight-forward process of removing the flush toilet, capping off the toilet drain, and installing the composting toilet. Some of the protests I heard from our friend suggested that it would be far more complicated than that, and that something about pulling the flush toilet and capping its drain would somehow be harmful to the functioning of the septic system. Huh???
I've seen plumbers remove flush toilets in an hour or less -- not a big deal. It doesn't seem that capping off the drain should be a very time-consuming or difficult process either. Is there something about removing a flush toilet input from a septic tank system that I'm not understanding? Or are our friends having just less comfortable with the composting toilet plan than I had thought?
