Transcription
This is a review of the Thetford Porta Potti. Today we're going to talk about why we think this is the best camping toilet for van life, truck life, or just RV life in general.
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First, let's get into what this actually is. This is a portable camping toilet, meaning you can take it pretty much anywhere. Pick it up, put it in a car, van, tent—whatever. It's made by Thetford and it's part of their Porta Potti line. This happens to be one of the larger versions, which is why we chose it. We like it because it has a five-and-a-half-gallon waste tank and there are four gallons of fresh water for when you want to use it to flush.
Some of the features of this portable camping toilet: just like a regular toilet, there's a seat; it can lift, put it down. Back here, there's a freshwater port, freshwater indicator, and this is the button for the flush valve. This has an electric flush, so that means you have to put batteries in it. Personally, we don't really use the flush, but we can get more into that later. On the bottom here is the tank. On the side of the tank is a toilet paper roll holder. This is how you flush the toilet, and when this shows red and you're ready to dump it, there's a lever back here. Turn, lift, take the top toilet portion off, set that aside, and then you walk this to a bathroom, sewer dump, or anywhere you can dump your waste. This turns, unscrew; you just lift and pour into the toilet. It's extremely easy to dump and then just put everything back together again.
So now that you know what it is, let me go mount it up in the camper and I'll show—I mean, explain how we actually use it. For those of you that are looking to maybe mount the toilet or just keep it steady while you're going down the road, Thetford does provide a mounting bracket that you can mount into your camper like we did. To put it in, all you have to do [Music] slide the toilet in, lock it in place, and it won't come loose while you're going down a dirt road, bumpy road, whatever.
All right, the toilet is mounted back into the camper, but before I get into what we think about this toilet, I want to go through some of the other types of toilets that we've used. When we first started our van life, we had a Class A that had a standard black tank. This means all the waste from the toilet went into a 40-gallon black tank. The problem was whenever we wanted to dump it, we had to go to a campground or RV dump station. It was nice because you could go longer times without dumping, but when you did have to dump, you had to leave and find a spot to do it.
After that, we had a cassette toilet in our Class B camper van. We really like this because of the ease and portability of being able to go wherever you wanted, and when you're ready to dump, just like this, you took the cassette out, walked it to a toilet or place, and you could dump it there. This and a cassette toilet are very similar; the only difference is that a cassette toilet is physically built into the camper itself, and there's a door on the outside where you access the cassette, pull it out. The one feature I like of a cassette toilet over a Porta-Potti is when you're carrying around five gallons or so of waste, it can get very heavy. The cassette toilet, when it pulled out, you got this cassette; it had wheels on it, just like, you know, a piece of luggage, and you could wheel it into a bathroom if you didn't want to carry it, which was kind of nice. This you physically have to carry.
We've also tried bucket toilets as well as collapsible toilets, and the principle behind these is basically you just put a bag in there and you go, and when you're done, you tie it off and walk it to, you know, a dumpster or something. An issue with those is, one, they can get pretty stinky; there's no way to really seal them off well. When you are ready to dump, you have to tie everything up; there are liquids in there, which means you have to be careful with it, and then you have to find a trash can or place to throw that out.
The nice thing with these is you can walk them to any toilet, Porta-Potti, RV dump station that you find and just pour it right down the hole and you're done. There is very little, if no, mess at all, very little smell, and it's quite nice. We like it because it's so portable that we've carried this specific toilet, I think, around in probably four or five different other campers, and it goes where we do. If we wanted to go tent camping, we could bring this along with us, set it inside the tent or outside of the tent. We could put it in a car, an SUV. We've mounted it to this camper, and if we get another camper, we could take it out and mount it in that. It's really versatile, and Kate and I, in our opinion, from all of the camping toilets that we've used, this one is by far our favorite and the one we will continue to use while we're living out of an RV.
The reason we decided to go with the Thetford Porta Potti over a cassette toilet in our particular camper is Four Wheel Campers actually does a cassette toilet as an option, but it's about ten times the price of this Porta Potti. For us, this was easier to mount, install; we don't have any extra holes in the side of the camper, plus it holds a gallon more than the cassette toilet that they offer. So for us, we could go longer, less expensive, and we don't have to cut any holes in the side of the camper to get it installed.
A lot of people have asked us, "Why don't you get a composting toilet?" Well, for us, a composting toilet is actually very similar to this because composting toilets have to separate the liquid waste with the solid waste. When you separate the liquid waste, that goes into a container that you have to take to a toilet or dump station, ordered just like this, but you're gonna have to do it more frequently because the tank size is much smaller. For us, the ability for the solid waste to kind of, you know, not have to be dumped as often isn't really a selling point for us when it's so easy to dump one of these. Also, the price point for a lot of the composting toilets out there are about ten times the price of this, so again, for us, this is more economical and better suits our lifestyle.
You can also use this toilet for number one and number two; everything goes in the top. When you're done, you can flush it down into the bottom. All the smells and nasty stuff stays all down here until you're ready to dump it out, and honestly, it's not bad when you dump it out. When you put it in a toilet, the toilet tends to self-flush itself; it all goes down, flush the rest, and you are done. There's no spills, no splashes usually if you're careful, and then you just walk right out of the bathroom.
So how we use this: we don't use this for number two, and that's been a point of contention for a lot of people in the past when we talked about our cassette toilet. The reason for this is we're trying to go as long as possible without having to dump this, so by keeping number two out of there, we probably get, mmm, three or four days with it, maybe more if we're careful. When we're camping at places like this, we might go outside, bring a bag along with us, or for a loud tube, we'll dig a hole and bury our waste. Other times, we'll just go someplace like a campground business, pit toilet, and do our business there. When we need to, though, we can do both in here; we have, and you know, if you have an emergency in the middle of the night, you need to go, it's right here. We also don't flush the toilet at all. Again, this is to keep the bottom as empty as possible for as long as possible. The only downside to that is you need to clean the toilet bowl out more often, but for us, it's worth it. We used to do the same thing in our Class A; very seldom when we actually flush the toilet, and we found we could go a lot longer between dumps.
Gentlemen, I want to offer all of you a tip: if you're going to use a portable camping toilet, make sure to sit down all of the time. These aren't like residential toilets; things tend to splatter out and on the walls, and you're gonna have to clean that up. Once you've done it once or twice, you don't want to do it again, so just sit down; it's that much easier. Also, for everyone, after you're done going, take your toilet paper and put it in the trash can; that'll save a lot of room in this tank.
In terms of chemicals, Thetford and a number of other companies make various chemicals that you can put in here to help break waste down or keep smells out. We don't like that chemical smell, so what we use is just white vinegar. It's very inexpensive; you can buy it pretty much in every store. You just put a little bit in the top when you go into the bottom.
In closing, it's our opinion that this is the best portable camping toilet. If you're interested in purchasing one, we'll put a link to Amazon below; that is our affiliate link. Also, if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't already, and if you want to see some more content that isn't necessarily about going to the bathroom, head on over to our website at wheretheRussos.com, and we'll see you next time. Bye.