It's as simple as 1-2-3
Back in the 60's Hardy Sundberg (Father of the present Sun-Mar partners) was trying to work out the best toilet set up for his cottage in Sweden. He started with an incinerating design, before finally concluding that maybe all he had to do was to help nature do it's own thing. The idea of a composting toilet was born. Hardy put together all kinds of toilets, before he hit upon his gold medal design. The basic problem was, and still is, how do you optimize conditions for breaking down what we at Sun-Mar call "solid material," while ending up with a safe compost, evaporating the liquid, and producing no smell. The key turned out to be a composting drum. A place where you could keep the compost moist; retain the heat in the core of the compost, and achieve perfect mixing and aeration simply by rotating and tumbling the compost. Nothing too clever there you may say. Sure, but Hardy still had to work out a few other pieces to the puzzle. How to make sure the compost didn't get too wet; how to make sure the waste went into the drum and stayed there; and how to extract compost from the drum. Hardy's solutions were pretty simple (some would say elegant). He cut a hole in the drum to receive the waste, and fitted a swinging door which closed automatically as the drum rotated for mixing, and opened automatically when rotated backwards for emptying. He put a screen at the rear of the drum to drain any excess liquid directly into an evaporating chamber. Finally he came up with the idea of a stopper which maintained the drum in a top dead center position to receive the waste, and allowed the drum to rotate backwards only when compost was being extracted. The rest was much easier; He placed the second chamber, the compost finishing drawer, immediately below the door in the composting drum. That way compost falling directly into the drawer could be left in the drawer for completion of the composting process, and emptied only when more compost had to be extracted from the drum. Compost in this second chamber was isolated from liquid and surrounded by a stream of drying air. The evaporating chamber, the floor of the toilet, formed the third chamber, from where excess liquids not absorbed by the compost were evaporated. Hardy did this by pulling air through intake holes at the front of each side of the toilet, over the evaporating chamber, and up the vent stack. By so doing, he created a partial vacuum inside the toilet to ensure that there could be no smell under any circumstances. In 1979, for Hardy Sundberg, the whole concept came together as easy as 1-2-3-.It was so good we've spent the last thirteen years polishing it.
"SUN-MAR" has the first self contained composting toilet in the world to be tested and certified by N.S.F. (The National Sanitation Foundation)
Excel. -89
Electrical Features are CSA APPROVED LR 55925
the International Inventor's Exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland.
- Composting Drum
- Finishing Drawer
- Evaporating Chamber
