Transcription
Cassette toilet or black tank? I'm gonna discuss the pros and cons of each and which might be best for your RV. We've had plenty of experience both having a black tank and having cassette toilets as well as portable toilets. So let's define what a cassette toilet is.
A cassette toilet is essentially a toilet that is built into a camper, and below the toilet is a cassette that collects all of the waste. Usually, these cassettes hold about four and a half gallons of waste, and in order to dump it, you walk out of the RV, go around to the side, open up a locking door, pull the cassette out, and walk that cassette to a dump station, toilet, or any other place you can dump your waste.
A black tank, on the other hand, is a built-in waste tank in an RV. So these tanks are not portable. They can be sized anywhere from about 10 gallons and up. When we had our Class A motorhome, our black tank was 40 gallons. Now this black tank gets dumped at a dump station. So RV parks, campgrounds, and different places have specific dump stations that you have to drive up to. Take a hose and you connect it to your RV's sewer system, and that hose goes down into the sewer. Now, not only are you dumping your black tank at that time, but you're also dumping the gray tank, which is all the sink and shower water. So black tank is anything that's going down from the toilet.
With a black tank, you have to drive the whole RV to the dump station. With a cassette toilet, your RV can be wherever it is. You just have to take the cassette to the dump station or wherever you're going to dump it. That said, I have seen portable waste tanks at campgrounds. And what people will do is they'll dump their black tank into that portable unit and then hook it onto their car or somehow wheel it over to the dump station to dump it.
Capacity. The black tank wins hands down. Again, as I mentioned earlier, I've seen these anywhere from, on the low end, 10 to 12 gallons, all the way up to 40, 50, 60 plus gallons for a black tank. If you're conservative, you can stay out a long time before you have to go dump that thing. Cassette toilets, on the other hand, mainly are about four and a half gallons. So for two people, when Kait and I were using it, we would get about three days worth of usage before we had to take it and dump it.
I did mention I'm gonna talk about portable toilets today as well. This one right here is only about two and a half gallons. They make portable toilets like the one we had in our Four Wheel Pop-up Camper that are over five gallons. So some portable toilets will actually hold more waste than your standard cassette toilet. The difference with a portable toilet versus a cassette toilet is this is portable. We can take it wherever, put it wherever, where a cassette toilet is actually built into the RV just like the toilet is for a black tank.
Beyond capacity, the biggest difference between a cassette toilet and a black tank is how you dump it. The cassette toilet, to me, is the easiest. We loved having a cassette toilet after having a black tank because you take this cassette, they have wheels, and you just put it on the ground and wheel it like a piece of luggage over to wherever you're gonna dump it.
Now the reason I like the cassette better is your options for where you can dump it are vast. We've gone into rest area bathrooms, porta potties, restrooms at campgrounds; you can also use dump stations. If you happen to be out of the country, many countries, especially in Europe, have specific dump stations just for cassette toilets. So you walk up to that and you take your cassette and just dump it right in.
Black tank, on the other hand, you have to physically take your RV to a dump station unless you have one of those portable containers I mentioned earlier. Once you get to the dump station, and I know all of you RVers out there who have ever used a black tank can relate to this, that dump station may not be in the best condition. The people using it before you may have made a complete mess all over the ground with human waste, toilet paper, all sorts of things, and it's not pretty. It also doesn't smell good. But you get your rubber gloves on, you take your long sewer hose, connect it to your RV, and then put it down into the sewer connection for the dump station. Open up the valve, and all 40 gallons or however big your waste tank is, go out and into the sewer. This can smell terrible. I know many times when we dumped ours, if the wind was just right, it would blow that scent from the sewer right up into my nose, and it's not a smell you forget quickly.
After you're done dumping your black tank, and usually we recommend having a clear elbow on there so you can see all of the things coming out and you know when it's finally done, but once that's done, you open your gray tank valve, and then wash everything out of the hose so that when you put it back in, you don't have chunks of waste in there. Now sometimes when you go to a dump station, if you're not camping at a campground, they may charge you to use their dump station. We've also seen dump stations at gas stations and truck stops and places like that that also, if you are not buying fuel, you're gonna have to pay a fee to dump your waste. This fee is typically anywhere between about $5 to $20 depending on where you are and how much you have to dump.
As obvious as it may be, I should state that with a black tank, you're gonna have to carry more equipment. You have to carry a sewer hose, extra hoses, and things like that to use specifically for your black tank. You don't wanna use your fresh water hose to be flushing out your black tank. You want a separate one for that. And this stuff takes up a lot of room. If you have a smaller RV, you're gonna have to find a place to put all that stuff.
When you use something like this, it has a built-in little funnel, and all you do is dump that into a toilet. It's actually quite easy and it's very quick. With the black tank, usually a dump takes us, I don't know, 10 to 15 minutes depending. And if there are other people at the campground looking to dump, so let's say you're leaving the campground on a Sunday, you could be in a line of people waiting to dump and having to wait for everyone else to get done before you get there, and hopefully the people before you made sure to clean up.
Now the potential for things to go wrong when you're using a black tank is pretty high. If you've ever seen the movie RV when Robin Williams is trying to pump out his tank and the line blows up on him, we haven't seen that happen, but we do have friends who went to go hook up their sewer line, it wasn't hooked up correctly, and they had quite a bit of waste in the bays of their RV all over the ground that they had to clean up. This has happened to other people we know. Luckily for us, we never ran into this, but we did have a few times where the sewer connection came undone, things had to get cleaned up, and it's just part of it, it happens.
With this, your biggest concern is making sure that you're aimed into the toilet properly. This is usually pretty easy because the toilet is fairly large. But where there is some difficulty is if you're trying to dump into a sewer connection at a campground because that hose or that pipe is only about yay big and it's a very small target for a full cassette. The only time I've ever had a problem with one of these is I mistakenly, when I was pouring into a toilet, I rested the cassette portion of this on the lip of the toilet and the funnel popped off and I lost my grip and got stuff all over the floor of the bathroom. That is a mistake I will not be making a second time.
Another downside to a cassette toilet is that it's gonna be heavy. You're gonna have four gallons, five gallons of waste, which is gonna weigh quite a bit when you're trying to take it out of the side of the RV and then go to a toilet or something to dump it. So if you're someone that's gonna have trouble lifting 30 to 40 pounds, then a cassette toilet might not be for you, and I would seriously consider looking into a black tank or if you're gonna use a cassette toilet, don't fill it up all the way.
Comfort. This is pretty much a tie. The nice thing with having a black tank is typically the RV manufacturer will put in a residential style toilet and it's very similar to the one you have at home. With cassette toilets, they don't tend to be as big as a residential toilet, but they're still decent size and you can use them comfortably like you use your toilet at home.
On a black tank, there is quite a bit of maintenance you need to keep your tank working properly. One of the big things out there is if you're not using enough water when you go to the bathroom, you could end up with the dreaded poop pyramid, which happened to us once. This is where the poop from the toilet as it goes down into the tank, there's not enough water in there to kind of move it into the tank, so it just starts to build up and build up and build up until it clogs your toilet. And then you have to take the toilet off or undo the toilet, go in there, and clean things up and kind of scooch it on into the black tank.
With a cassette toilet, there's not too much there to go wrong. You can't really get much of a pyramid because you're not gonna be using it long enough for that to happen. That said, you do need to maintain the seals of the toilet and make sure that when you put the cassette back in, that it goes all the way and clicks. Otherwise, you're gonna have waste coming out of the side and into the kind of area where the cassette sits. And that's not pretty either.
Both have their cleaning regiments that you follow. And in terms of using products for smell, both use similar products. Now with a black tank in terms of smell, when you put a product in there, it has more time to work and it has time to break things down. In a cassette, really you're just trying to deodorize it so that it doesn't come back up when you flush. With both toilets, the one thing you don't want to do is go to the bathroom and leave the vent fan on. Because what that'll do is it'll pull air through the toilet up and out, and you get quite a whiff when you go to flush that toilet. The smells from both are pretty much the same. And for the most part, as long as you're using a good tank deodorizer or some other form of black tank treatment, you're not really going to get smells coming out of the toilet as long as you keep that fan off.
Flexibility and portability. Neither the cassette toilet nor the black tank toilet are portable. The cassette is portable, so you can take that to wherever you need to go dump. But for the most part, both of these units are built into the RV. The benefit here in terms of flexibility for the black tank is after a while if you need to replace your toilet, it's just like replacing your toilet at home. There are a couple bolts on the ground, take those out, undo the water lines and whatnot, and then put a new toilet in. So if you wanna upgrade to a nicer toilet, your old toilet, it just needs time for replacement, it's much easier to do. With the cassette toilet, that whole unit would have to be replaced.
With a portable toilet, this wins in the portability category because you can buy this for one RV, take it to another RV. If you're going on a road trip in your SUV and you want a toilet for the kids, you can bring this along. It's much easier and portable. Our favorite is actually one of the Thetford models that we will link to in this video. But this has a over a five-gallon capacity and we actually took this from multiple RVs as we were testing different things and then eventually installed it into our Four Wheel Pop-up Camper.
Another point about flexibility is if you're ever considering taking your RV out of the country, the cassette toilet is the better option. Once you leave North America, most countries don't have dump stations like we have here in the US or Canada. This becomes a problem because if you have a big RV and you need to dump the tanks on it, if you can't find a dump station, you're gonna have to figure out a way to get that 40 gallons of waste out of the RV and into a toilet or some other receptacle.
For example, when we were in Europe, virtually every RV there has cassette toilets. That is the norm for them, and we didn't see any with a black tank. You take your RV to the dump station if you need to dump your gray water, and there is a sewer grate on the ground that you dump your gray water. They have a separate dump station for all the cassette toilets that you pull it out, walk it over, and as I mentioned earlier, there's like a large stainless steel type sink. You dump it in, they'll have water there for you to rinse, swish it around, dump it a second time, and then you're off. If you're going down to Mexico or other places, there are campgrounds that are gonna have full hookups like you have here in the US, but when we were down there, most of what we found were gonna be portable toilets or toilets at a campground where we had to take our portable toilet and go dump it in those places. If we had had a standard black tank, the places we went, there would have been nowhere for us to dump it.
Now I'm gonna address the elephant in the room, which is composting toilets. Whenever the discussion of toilets comes up, people always ask, well, what about composting toilets? Because you don't have to dump them and all those other things. Well, you have to dump a composting toilet. The way a composting toilet works is it separates the liquids from the solids. The liquids will go into a small jug that has to get dumped. Once your solid waste compartment is full, you have to take that, transfer it to a bag, and then throw that bag out.
Now the downside with having a composting toilet and living in a small space is that you have to source and carry around the medium for that toilet. Typically, this is some type of a husk or that that you put in there, and it's able to absorb the liquid from the solid waste, help dry it so you don't get a smell. We've known a lot of people over the years who have had composting toilets, and on one hand, some of them love them. On the other hand, some have had some bad experiences with them. For example, if you are using a composting toilet in a very humid environment, the medium can stay moist and it won't get rid of that smell and it'll actually get worse. We've also had friends who got a bad batch of medium and they put it in the toilet, used the toilet, and the next day when they went to go lift the lid, some type of bug had hatched in there and thousands of them flew up into their tiny RV. So for us, composting toilets really aren't our thing.
We love portable toilets. And we will link to a video all about our favorite portable toilet that we've used. So that is it for this video. I would actually love to know what your favorite is. Have you used all of these? If so, which one worked out the best for you? Now we've talked all about RV toilets on our website, weretherussos.com. So if you're curious about some of the best composting toilets out there, dry flush toilets, portable toilets, cassette toilets, head on over to our website, weretherussos.com, and you'll find everything there. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up. Subscribe if you haven't already, and we will see you next time. Thank you again, bye.
My second book, Tales from the Open Road, The Adventures and Misadventures of RV Living is now available for sale on Amazon. Read all about the ups and downs of our first year and a half living on the road full time.