Rootless: A New Vehicular Mate, Part 6: Toilet

The Toilet Paper Incident, circa 1981.

I created a bedroom in my Prius.


But I didn't want just any old bedroom. I wanted an en suite bedroom.

Toilet instructions in Thai restaurant in Tbilisi, Caucasus Georgia. August 2011.

Enter the Luggable Loo.

The Luggable Loo is a toilet seat and lid that you snap onto a five-gallon bucket. You can buy the items separately or you can buy the seat/lid/bucket package. It is less expensive to buy the items separately.

Luggable Loo. Photo source: Disaster Supply Center

Except for extraordinary circumstances, I plan to use my car loo only for urination. And furthermore, in most cases, only at night.

Toilet in Vakhtangisi, on Georgian-Ajerbaijan border. March 2012.

Obviously, I don't need a five-gallon container to collect my urine for an overnight. I am not a horse.

Typical toilet in Dubai, UAE. January 2012.

To manage the urine collection more elegantly than a splash waterfall into a cavernous bucket, I inserted a funnel-and-laundry detergent bottle catchment system into the bucket, an idea I learned from a vandweller named Crysal Vanner, as you can see in the video below:

I tested it in my bathroom at home, numerous times. Perfect!

• Both the bucket and the catchment system are stable, i.e. no dangers of tipping over or sliding out of place
• The catchment system is easy to pull out and it's easy to pour the contents into a real toilet
• The laundry bottle is large enough to accommodate even the most prolific nights, unlike that coffee can I used in the tent that one time in Cave Springs Campground in Arizona a long time ago, about which I had felt darn smug before I realized just how much liquid one can produce in one night, not to mention what happens when the can tips over

I placed my toilet on the floor behind the driver's seat. When just driving around, it fits just fine there. However, to use the toilet en suite, I need to pull the driver's seat forward quite a bit, then tilt the seat forward, as well. These actions give me the space I need to actually sit on the toilet.

I'm not enthusiastic about having to move the driver's seat forward so much at night. Although I can - barely - get into the front seat at that position, I don't think it's possible to drive in that position, which means that if I need to make a fast exit, I lose time in repositioning the driver's seat. (Of course, that is probably a moot point, as it takes rather more time to extricate myself from my bed and then make my way to the driver's seat. By the time I get to the point of having to adjust my seat position, any bears or zombies will have likely already delivered a mortal swipe.)

I'm on the look out for a 3.5-gallon bucket that I hear is also workable with the Luggable Loo seat, but I've not yet found one. In theory, this will give me more wiggle room in the "bathroom," which will reduce the front seat adjustment and will also free up some valuable real estate in the floor space behind the front seat.

But other than that - Chez Prius is almost ready for an inaugural road trip!

"Almost" because I've still got some window curtaining details to iron out.


Related posts: 

A New Vehicular Mate, Part 1
A New Vehicular Mate, Part 2
A New Vehicular Mate, Part 3
A New Vehicular Mate, Part 4
A New Vehicular Mate, Part 5: Bed


And following this Part 6 of the New Vehicular Mate series, I'll rename the series Chez Prius.