Vermiculture Flushing Toilet

The flushing vermiculture toilet system is similar to a normal flushing toilet inside the house, but it is the treatment on the outside that is different. Instead of a usual septic tank, we put our composting worms to work first.

We have been selling composting worms to people with these toilets for some time now, finally, we have built our own.

vermiculture flushing toilet (19) — The structure for the worm farm to decompose the humanure is done. Now all we need is to build the worm farm and let them settle in until we finish the new bathroom

A big thanks to the volunteers who were here in November who collected stones, experimented with building the wall and light earth and help with insulating the roof.

vermiculture flushing toilet (16) — We built up stone walls with stones from around the land, insulated it with leftover roof mate and filled any gaps with light earth (straw and clay.)

vermiculture flushing toilet (1) — We started off with a nice level foundation for the water tank

Worm farm was built with a layer of sand and then gravel to allow drainage of liquids. On top of this was a net to stop the gravel becoming blocked. On top of this, I half-filled the tank with twigs, straw and cardboard for a worm bedding. I then emptied one of my worm farms over this (about 1kg of worms with castings and eggs) and covered this with some manure for them to eat and multiple. We will leave the worm farm to settle for three weeks and then we will use our flushing loo for the first time

Setting up a net in the worm farm so the worm casting do not block the tap

You can also take a read about our completed vermiculture long drop dry toilet, where worms eat all the poo but lots of water is saved.

References:

We first heard of this at Rak Tamachat in Thailand, however they used the worms in the first chamber of a home made septic tank rather than replacing a septic tank.

We based this design from http://www.vermicompostingtoilets.net/