Desperate times

Artist's rendering

The weekend when the cousins visited, our poo-hole went completely pear-shaped and blanketed the cottage and environs in a greenish miasma of stink (complete with stink lines). It was an unholy stench, and the island just happened to be becalmed the entire weekend with not so much as a puff of a breeze to shift the stench cloud.

We were living in the bog of eternal stench (oh, how that cracked me up as a kid). After a few hours in the poo hole, the captain was able to replace the malfunctioning fans and heater with functioning fans and heater. Slowly, the stink in the bathroom began to abate, the but the stink cloud still lingered around the property.

We left the fans and heater running while we were gone the following week (a bit of a no-no), hoping to air out and dry out the stinking mess.

When we returned the next weekend with the Captain's family, the bathroom was somewhat tolerable (still not perfect) but the cottage area still smelled awful.

Back into the poo-hole he dove to discover that, in the process of shifting the holding tank around to replace the fans, he had managed to dislodge the pipe for the vent stack. The tank was venting directly under the cottage, rather than 3 feet above the roofline, where the wind would carry the smell away. Haha! Problem solved! Again, the smell improved, but the relatives still complained (there was altogether too much complaining, IMHO). If only they had been there a week earlier, they would realize that their laments were baseless. It was much better. The whinging didn't do much for the Captain's morale.

Fast forward yet another weekend, and we returned on Friday to a cottage bathroom that smelled 100% as it should.

Calloo! Callay! It's fixed!

That lasted less than 6 hours. *face palm*

Artist's rendering

By Saturday, the bathroom smelled so bad your eyes watered just going in there. It was worse than an outhouse.

The captain was digging in his heels. He didn't want to spend another two hours in the foetid poo-hole. I suspect his nose hairs were still curled from the last incident. Thinking the heater was the problem, he shut it off. No improvement. Airflow was the problem; we weren't getting any. As a result, the stink was entering the building. When the poo-hole is working as designed, air is sucked in at the toilet seat, carrying the stink down through the tank and out the vent stack. This wasn't happening.

Saturday night I badgered and cajoled. He resisted. We tried to identifiy causes. We debated tossing in the towel and buying a whole new unit ($2500+. Ouch.) The captain was fed up.

In desperation, I gave the airflow a boost with my brand-new 12" oscillating fan (*sob*). It made using the toilet problematic, but it solved the problem of the watering eyes. At least it bought us a bit of time.

The next morning, the Captain plucked up the courage to descend once more into the pits of hell.

And once again, I had a toilet sitting in my yard. What must the neighbours think?!

We had decided that, since airflow was the problem, there were a few possible causes:
- The fans died again.
- The vent stack was blocked.
The captain figured that if he disconnected the vent stack and air was still being pushed out of the unit, we could rule out the fans, so that's where he started.

Turns out, the blower wasn't blowing. Egads, another dead fan so soon?

One he shifted the unit around, he spotted the problem. It's hard to see in this photo, but you're looking in the hole at the vent fan (the one that blows out of the unit). It has toilet paper lodged in it, preventing it from turning!

o.0

Riiiiiiight.....

Who designs a poo-hole tank with fans that can get wodged up with an errant bit of paper!?!

Oh. You.
(fwiw, we're using the prescribed TP).

Grrrrrr.

So, with a pair of needle-nosed pliers he carefully extricated the paper from the fan, and - thank heavens - it fired right up when he plugged the unit back in. I was fully expecting it to be fried.

As of the time we left, the bathroom smelled dandy fine, and the toilet was venting properly. *crosses all fingers, toes, and eyes*

Now to figure out why their prescribed "Daily Mix" that we just bought reeks of ammonia. (that ain't right). No doubt if we called, they'd tell us someone must've pee'd in the storage bucket under the sink.