It's been about a year since we started using our composting toilet, and the first bin is filled to the brim.  Time to add another seat and change bins!

When we first built the composting toilet, I planned to store the sawdust in the central bin just like the author does in The Humanure Handbook.  Since then, though, I've decided it's better to simply fill up a big trashcan with sawdust and use that to fill our five-gallon bucket, which sits by the seat for ease of scooping.

What's wrong with keeping the sawdust in the middle bin?  Filling a bucket out of the central bin requires awkward bending over, the sawdust there has begun to decay a lot due to contact with the wet ground, and it's also caught a tiny bit of seepage from the used bin beside it, which makes the sawdust much less fun to handle.  Even if that last point is really all in my head (I only saw a smidgen of toilet paper amid the sawdust and doubt there was much seepage), it still seemed like a good idea to shovel the sawdust out and use it as the bottom bedding in the new bin since we want to fill our bin halfway with high-carbon material before we start using it anyway.  Plus, this way we can fill the middle bin next year and give this past year's bin a full twenty-four months to decay before it goes on the garden.

Deciding on sawdust placement only took a couple of minutes, and I spent the rest of the day building the new seat, but this post is already too long, so I'll save that story for another day.

warm regards to you both,
John