I "personally water it" whenever I go out to add to or work on it. I don't save it up though. Though lots of people do. Not too uncommon considering the fresh water savings of not flushing it and the moisture and nitrogen benefits of adding it to the pile...

1) Not at all.
2) Not enough info provided to even guess. Sorry.

Turnip and Pea? yah, you'll fit right in around here. :)

Lloyd

I'll add some extra N to the pile when I go out in the morning to stir it up usually; most of 'it' goes into bags of leaves with holes in the bottem to see how much difference it makes compared to the normal bags of leaves.
I started the compost pile a little backwards, but once I got a normal mix of N and C it heated up within a week or two.

1) I add liquid gold whenever the pile is too dry.
2) A pile can heat up within hours if circumstances are right (eg. a big pile of slightly moist grass in summer temperatures).

I use my urine. I save it and I add it directly. Just depends on the circumstances. My pile heats up once a critical mass is met. Once it starts it doesn't cool down for quite a while.

Can compost get hot in the winter if it's in a bin/trashcan?

Wow, lots of people recycle pee! ..wonders what neighbors would think..

mine goes directly to watering around the plants that need it.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

Teacher mom,
It can get hot if it has enough mass to retain the heat. 1 cubic yard is ideal, but half of that can get hot.

I've never noticed the addition of pee having a big effect on the compost temperature, and think of it as a rather weak nitrogen source. We toss it just about anywhere and have never noticed it burning the vegetation. But then we live in a fairly rainy climate - it might be different if we lived in a very dry climate.

We've been depositing all our pee outside for a few years now, either directly or collected in buckets, thereby saving thousands of gallons of water and making our wild rose hedge lush enough to get compliments. We're fortunate to have the land and the privacy from neighbours to be able to do this. Urine has come to seem a precious resource, truly gold. Just between you and me, I've more than once, in a raging blizzard in the dead of a winter night when the pee bucket was full, peed in the kitchen compost bucket rather than use the toilet, but I always empty it the next day so it doesn't smell.

To answer your question about how long to heat up; it took my latest pile about 5 days to return to 145 degrees after turning it.

I have windrows of leaves the city brings me each Fall - 30 cubic yards. Pouring my urine over them helps break them down into leaf mold. Wonderful addition to garden soil.
The 5 gallon bucket in my shed gets dumped daily and with that much material, never smells. My bathroom is upstairs so this is easier and far more logical than using a gallon of drinking water to flush a few ounces of sterile nitrogenated liquid.

We use a 5 gallon bucket as a toilet. To start, put a couple inch layer of leaves, sawdust, shredded paper etc in the bottom. Place bucket into frame holding toilet seat. Use toilet, "flush" with a handful of shredded paper or cover #2 with a scoop of sawdust. No smell. If there there is a smell, add more cover material. When about 4 buckets are ready to go in the compost, we dig a hole in the hot top middle of the compost pile and dump the buckets in (this is the only time the smell is objectionable.) Once buckets are dumped and washed out (wash water n soap go onto pile as well) and the pile is covered up with another bag of other people's leaves the smell goes away. If it doesn't, then more cover is needed.
Leave the buckets out in the sun to dry as this keeps them from holding onto the ammonia smell.

This method works just fine for urine only. Actually, a 5 gallon bucked filled with sawdust sitting on top of another bucket with lid I understand makes a good urinal for the guys. Shredded leaves or paper can work in place of sawdust too.

The other half has used the kitchen compost bucket to pee. He actually claims it gets rid of the fruit flys. Adding some sawdust in takes care of the smell and soaks up the liquid.

Liquid gold can be added to the compost direct or from bottles but once I've put it in a bottle, it's usually easier to dilute and use around the plants as fertilizer.

I've had compost heat up in a trash bin after adding about 3 5 gallon buckets of smelly material but managing compost in a plastic bin is hard. We do better in an outdoor bin that is at least 3' on a side or a hardware wire circle.

compost can heat up in winter but it is battling the temps to get hot compost started when the ambient temps are below 40 F.

Here is a link that might be useful: Our bins

Once in a while. No particular schedule. Also on leaf piles and brush piles, etc.

I use a sawdust toilet, too, but in my case it's a shredded-junk-mail toilet. I keep the bucket outside my backdoor, out of sight of the neighbors, and I have to say, I love going outside in the mornings for a pee and watching the bees buzzing in the basil. It's a nice way to start the day.

Now, I just started doing this about a month ago, so I can't swear yet that it works, but I think it might.

It was an evolution.

First I asked my husband to pee outside. He was so not interested.

Then our water shut down for a while, so we both did it, and it wasn't bad.

Then I started sitting (I'm a girl) on the edge of the raised bed at night (when the neighbors presumably couldn't see), and peeing directly onto the lasagna.

Then because of something I read here, I got inspired to reduce my paper waste stream to as little as possible. At first I was just planning to save all our household's paper output until the summer, when I'd have enough nitrogen to balance the carbon in the paper.

But then I realized that the urine might serve as a good accelerant for the decomp of the shredded paper.

So after reading the appropriate chapters in the Humanure Handbook online, I started peeing in a five-gallon bucket of shredded paper (see above for deets).

Last but not least, I ordered the Luggable Loo, which is a toilet seat that fits on the top of the bucket.

So far I really like it. Now, it's not like I would ever confess this in public. Only my husband knows, and I'm guessing my housekeeper will eventually do the math, but so far I feel pretty good about it. Saves so much water, helps recycle paper (hopefully), provides free nutrients for my plants.

Win-win-win.

I collect it (because the garden is a mile away from where I live) and either add it to the compost pile or dilute it (1:2 to 1:10, depending on how concentrated it is, what I'm watering, and how rainy it's been) and water my vegetables. The rule of thumb is to avoid using urine on plant parts that you're planning to eat in the next few weeks. So I water the artichokes, brassicas (the 5-ft. broccolis and 4-ft. kales), and comfreys, but not the radishes or carrots or new kale seedlings (the ones that are less than a foot high).

Nope, I don't.

But my Bulldog does...

My husband & I do. First I asked him because he has to use a catheter to go anyway so he was already used to that concept. Then I figured, well if I'm gonna' ask him to do it I may as well give it a try and it was much easier than I thought. We save it in a large jar with a tight screw on lid that gets dumped daily. There is no odor from it except briefly while it's being dumped. My compost pile is only a huge bed of leaves right now with a serious shortage of nitrogen-rich materials which is why this seemed like a good idea. I try to rotate dumping spots and have noticed the areas that receive more of the urine are breaking down much faster. Once it's poured out and covered over a little there are so many leaves/carbon materials that there is no offensive odor at all even standing right next to it.

As for the container, I would use a bucket but we have a very tiny bathroom and it's not exactly discrete when we have company. At least with the jar we can tuck it away under the cabinet where it won't be seen. Toilet paper and all goes in the jar and gets poured into the compost pile so as not to waste any flushing water. Considering we were in a terrible drought this year I wish I had read up on this sooner because every little bit saved helps.

Thankfully we live way out on private property so no one sees me when I take it out to deposit it. I think I would have a very hard time explaining this practice to my friends and family so for now I'm too chicken to go bragging about it except on this forum lol. Maybe I'll get my nerve up one day and convert them all!!

Danielle

You've reminded me about the paper - that doesn't go in the pee bucket here either because we have a wood stove. It goes in its own bucket and gets burned whenever the bucket's full. A lot of people with old septic systems do that around here. Collecting used toilet paper took more getting used to, psychologically, than collecting urine, as far as seeming unsanitary.

Just started to occasionally. Unfortunately the homes in our neighborhood are pretty close together and so there is no way to "hit the pile" directly. In my attempt to restart an almost frozen pile, however, I have been collecting when I remember.

Remember the best thing about fresh though, the temp is body and so should help to thaw, or keep the heat in a pile rather than cooling it off!

My take on it is that if you can save water while you are doing it, its a good thing. Saving water has been a big deal here in the Southeast recently, and will continue to be all over the world. You can also make your compost a little more "personal" which I like. :)

There is a group that is dedicated to trying to get people to urinate outside--I will make an attempt at linking to it.

Here is a link that might be useful: peeoutside

Me- no. My husband in the summer, especially during a drought since we are on a well. Our nearest neighbor is 1/2 mile away so no problems with privacy.

I think this is a really fascinating subject, and would love to try it, but what is the impact on the compost from the pee of people who take prescription drugs, or any OTC drugs, for that matter? I mean, are birth control pills or such passed through into the urine and into the compost?

Any thoughts?

I think it was Leno who said that if urine would actually work then every frat house in America would look like a tropical rain forest. vbg etc

Excess drugs and vitamins do pass through; however, it would only be a fraction of what was actually in the pill, assuming your dosages are correct and your body is using most of it. The excess drugs will be dilute, and will be broken down in the pile.

I may have told this here before, so 'scuse me if I'm repeating myself.

My grandfather's bedroom had a door to the outside, right next to the chicken house.

We kids sometimes spent the night with our grandparents, & my brothers slept with Papa.
When they needed to tinkle, they just stepped outside, & all 3 of them stood on the back step & aimed at the area in front of the chicken house.

Granny grew daturas right there.

biggest dang daturas I ever saw in my life.
...........
...........

Ok, remembered another story:

In the early 80's, country-western clubs were all the rage here, & a guy I know built one beside a major highway, outside the city limits, which meant that he couldn't get sewer service.

The city offered to provide sewer...
if the owner would agree to voluntary annexation to the city (taxes!) *and* if he'd pay for the sewer line.

so he installed a massive septic system.

Opening night, everything overflowed.

So he routed a line from the septic to an adjacent field.

The next day he added more septic capacity, but he kept thinking that that vacant field was a good place to get rid of excess "fluid" to prevent back-ups in the future, so he left the line out there.

He eventually removed it;
he said he realized one day in August that the health department couldn't help but notice the grass in that field.
It was was lush & green while everything for miles around was brittle & brown.

sfc_newbie,

The only drugs I'd be concerned about would be antibiotics and any heavy metal chelators (unlikely to be used outside of the hospital). Otherwise the daily multivitamin and other OTC drugs are probably just fine. But if you're on a specific prescription drug it would be a good idea to find out if its passed in urine and what the potential issues would be (ie kill the activity of the pile, or passing a contagion).

So I wouldn't recommend it if you're suffering from a UTI. :)

My brother-in-law is French, and all over France men stop their cars to hop out and 'faire pee pee'. We have often stopped whilst travelling to accommodate his love of outdoor peeing. Even my mother got used to it, and there's hardly a break in the conversation now while he takes care of business and hops back in, and off we go again...