Plumbing Redux

When I acquired Ardea, she had a holding tank and a macerator pump installed so that the toilet effluent could be flushed overboard from the tank while at sea. There was no way to expel poo at a shoreside pump-out station. Legally, one has to be at least 3 miles from shore to pump their poo into the water for fairly obvious reasons. So, being that we live in Berkeley, about 10 miles from the Poo Expulsion Zone, as it's officially known (not to be confused with PEZ candy, which are both delicious and entertaining), I couldn't use the head on the boat in the original configuration. Incidentally, I was doing a lot of fieldwork last spring and between that and living on the boat, I'd say I urinated outdoors about 80% of the time. All well and good for a dude like myself, but it only takes a couple penguin walks down the docks in the rain to know that on-board sanitation systems are necessary and good.

The Plan:

I wanted a system with these features:

-fully manual (no electrical draw: does anybody want to buy a macerator pump? I cleaned it, I promise)

-ability to pump directly overboard (i.e., bypass the holding tank)

-no new holes in the deck

-more support for the holding tank under the v-berth

The Cost:

This was a pretty cheap project. I was able to re-use a lot of the plumbing tubing. I did have some expenses though.

-$25 for plastic plumbing tubing (rated for sanitation systems)

-$60 for Y-valve

-About 6 hours of labor

The Result:

Works like a charm.

There's not a whole lot to see on this one, but I've put some photos of my configuration and a generalized diagram of the set-up.

It's pretty simple. The Y-valve allows the excreter to select whether to send their effluent to the tank or straight to the sea. The tank can be emptied in two ways. 1) The terminal 'out' tube that runs from the bottom of the holding tank can be fed through the port light in the head. The cap is then unscrewed and a shoreside pumpout vacuum sucks all the poo out from under my bed. 2) The terminal out tube is kept in the head. The cap is unscrewed and the soft rubber fitting is screwed in. This is then placed in the toilet. A decent seal needs to be made in between the toilet bowl and the rubber fitting. The Y-valve is then put in the 'direct-overboard' configuration. Manual pumping of the toilet then draws effluent from the holding tank overboard.