Sewage Spill

Water leaks are no fun. No one likes the damage that a little water creates. But make this sewage waste, and this is just plain nasty! The damage and the smell is terrible. Luckily we don't have a large sewage system and we caught it early, so the cleanup wasn't extensive.

While we were staying at the campground at the Naval Air Station Key West-Sigsbee Park, our little portapotty stopped working as intended. We got it over a year ago, but only been using it since around August of this year. It had been working perfectly. The top 4-gallon clean water reservoir and seat pop off the sealed 5.5-gallon black water tank. The black water tank has a handle, allowing us to carry it like a briefcase to any normal bathroom to drain and flush into any normal toilet.

Long before we started our build we knew that a toilet is a necessity. When you gotta go, you gotta go. Those emergencies do happen. And we knew we didn't want to have to scrounge to find a toilet in the middle of the night. As of today we have only ever peed in our little portapotty. We are trying to go as long as possible without having to create meat-soup... We don't want to have to lug around poop. And, so far, this has been working out. We hadn't had any issues, until we did. ...

Up until our stay on base, we had been able to fully tip the waste water tank inside ShaVanda. (There is a bit of a squeeze maneuvering around at times, and being able to tip the tank makes carrying it out easier.) But we quickly learned that the seal of the waste water tank was no longer sealing. When we tipped the tank to bring it out to the flush down the nearby bathroom, it began to spill out across our floor, over our rugs, and into my sandals. How fun. Luckily we weren't having to clean up shit, just piss... and it was still pretty rank smelling.

Following the spill, we scrubbed our floor and took our rugs to the laundromat. I ended up throwing away my sandals. I tried cleaning them but they were still rank.

Over the next few days we attempted to figure out if we could fix the problem. We had no such luck. The only fix was a complete replacement. Downtown Key West there is a marine store and we found a newer model of our toilet and bought it. And bit further down the road we found a dumpster and tossed our old toilet in it.

We need a toilet. We've already proven that to oursleves. Hopefully this one works better and for longer. If not, we're going to need to figure something else out.

Until then, we have a working toilet. And one that actually flushes better, AND, has a little color changing marking to help us figure out when we need to dump the waste water. So far, we're liking this new toilet.

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