An excellent and well written report. Many thanks for the link. It's a variation -- and apparently a successful one -- of the toilets that were on the Whitney trail (evaporative)but which failed. It would be interesting to compare the designs and why the previous ones failed. Did the Whitney sites just not get enough sun? Are there better sites?
g.
The old Whitney toilets used burlap sacks, which failed early on, and then were adapted to use baskets to dehydrate the solids. The Long's Peak toilets also use baskets but the entire system seems to be upgraded and better engineered. For example, the solar collectors used to heat the air that is blown across the baskets. Long's Peak also has an effective system to separate and evaporate the liquid waste. The devil is in the details. It requires custom engineering to overcome the various challenges that come up. The key parameter is sizing the system to match the realistic maintenance that can be performed. The Whitney system seemed to be undersized relative to the frequency of removing waste. I think they did only two helicopter runs per year if I recall, and they were storing waste in drums and having spills etc etc. I can see where the Rangers would hate it. One way to increase the capacity is to use a rotating basket that can hold more waste without building another seat. Adding a urinal can also improve performance by reducing the volume of liquid to separate out.
As for siting, the Trail Camp location seemed correct, but I'm not so sure about where they located the Outpost toilets. As for solar energy available, you can't do much better than southern California. The mountains shorten the length of exposure, but it's plenty if the collectors are sized right.
