I wasn't sure if I should post about this - but this is a part of life living differently - living with a smaller carbon footprint in my case.

I woke up yesterday to a small disaster: my composting toilet had leaked brown, sludgy water onto the bathroom floor. Yuck!

This is totally my fault - completely an issue of user error. There are two small tubes on each side of the toilet. The instructions say to keep an eye on the left tube - if you see liquid building up there, then turn the thermostat up since that meant there was too much fluid in the toilet. Turning up the thermastat would make the toilet run warmer and dry out the exess liquid BEFORE you have an issue.

Well... I was watching the wrong tube. It's the tube on the left "as you look at the toilet" - as it's stated in the toilet's manual. I kept watching the other one - just remembering "left". Since I didn't see any fluid in that other tube at all - I thought I was running really dry. I was even adding water to the toilet to help disolve toilet paper! sheesh!

Instead, liquids were building up and eventually ran out over the base tray - and out onto my floor. Doh!

So I had a nasty, yucky mess to clean up on my birthday. Not fun.

I've drained as much as the fluid as I can, cleaned up the mess on the floor and turned the thermostat way up. The fluid in the tube is nearly gone now. What a pain though.

Well - now I know where to look - and I won't be making that mistake again!