There are several kinds of marine sanitation systems out there and they all require a certain amount of maintenance.
Back in the day in my old sailboat I had a marine head that pumped directly overboard. It's illegal to do that now and I believe they use a holding tank but a couple of days after I bought her I closed the seacocks, cut and plugged the lines and donated the head to one Davy Jones to put in his locker. I replaced it with a 5 gallon plastic bucket and never had a problem with a marine head the entire time I owned the boat.
I kept an unused plastic porta potty deep in a locker somewhere to keep the powers that be off of my back.
Anyway, one of the systems I have had to maintain is what they call a marine sanitary system that used some kind of of organism to reduce the solids into a liquid state so they can wash over chlorine tablets and go overboard.
The organisms are referred to as simply 'bugs'. Every so often you flush a package of them down the head and into the processing box to keep the bug population up and happy and keeping their bellies full of nice, nutritious human waste. The package looks very much like yeast of some sort.
I don't know what species they are and really don't care. Neither do most other sailors. They're simply called bugs and if they do their job I'll leave them alone and won't publicly identify them. Nobody wants to be identified as a $hit eater. Would you?
Enter some trainee that saw me walking by with a packet of bugs in my hand headed toward the head. He wanted to know what I was doing and I told him I was going to flush bugs down the head.
"What kind of bugs?" he asked.
"The kind that dine on delicious and nutritious human waste," I replied. "They're kind of like yeast."
"What kind of bugs are those?" he asked. I knew where this one was going and I wasn't in the mood to play the 'But why?' game.
"They're Black Widow spiders," I answered."Now go below and get me five gallons of them. They come in a blue bucket."
He came back lugging a blue 5 gallon pail of oil.
People like that eventually learn. It takes time but they eventually learn.
It is called a macerator toilet. The waste goes into a holding tank and a tablet was put into toilet and flushed down into holding tank. How do I know this? Our 32 foot cruiser had this system.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat different unit. I used a macerator decades ago on a fish boat. The macerator has a chopper. This unit relies on bugs to reduce the solids,
DeleteI notice it states unknown. Sailor, it's SR.
ReplyDelete