Your Guide to Buying and Using a Porta Potty
Portable toilets come in handy in a number of different situations. Whether for public or private events, outdoor secondary toilets, or even at home for elderly or disabled family members, they can help you take care of one of the universal human problems that naturally occurs over time: the number two.
Now, this isn’t a guide to teach you how to use a toilet. It’s a very straightforward process. However, chemical toilets are a different beast from the regularly installed toilets you’re used to — as an event organizer or homeowner, knowing how porta potties work, and how to best maintain them under various circumstances, is vital to keeping an event running smooth, or to prevent problems at home.
What is a Porta Potty?
To begin with: what is a porta potty? A porta potty, or more technically referred to as a chemical toilet, is a portable toilet designed to dissolve your human waste and deodorize it, so the final product doesn’t smell like it does in its natural state.
There are other types of porta potties. Composting toilets, for example, combines your waste with various materials and an aerobic processing system to remove odor and moisture, by mixing excrements with sawdust or peat moss commonly. Freezing toilets and incinerating toilets on the other hand, are rarer more complicated forms of portable toilets that use electricity to freeze or burn waste in a holding tank.
Most commonly, however, porta potties use a chemical reaction to deodorize and break apart feces — and managing these chemical toilets requires an understanding of how they work.
How do Chemical Toilets Work?
Chemical portable toilets are used at construction sites and events alike, and utilize a formaldehyde-based or ammonia-based chemical as per WiseGeek to deodorize and break apart human excreta. The chemical is usually blue for the purpose of turning green after use — at which point the chemical is no longer effective.
When that happens, and the holding tank filled with chemicals is no longer capable of breaking down feces, it needs to be emptied out before overuse occurs. Chemical toilets have a chemical reservoir and holding tank for the waste, and another tank for flushing water. Once a chemical toilet’s water reservoir is empty, you need to refill it.
The same goes for the chemical. As per InspectAPedia, you need a plastic bottle or single packet of dry deodorizing powder for about 40 gallons of wastewater. Wastewater includes flushed water and the excreta. Checking your portable toilets often for the color of their chemical, smell, and water quantity can help you time when it’s time to drain the contents of the toilet to a nearby septic system, or a publicly-owned treatment works, as per MadeHow.com.
How To Find a Quality Portable Toilet
Portable toilets come in countless shapes, sizes, and degrees of quality. However, finding the right porta potty for your event requires you to look not just for the product quality, but for the customer service. Rentable porta potties require you to rent from a reputable, quality provider of porta potty rentals. Companies like Fence Factory Rentals can provide you with the event necessities you need to keep your event running smoothly.
