Toilet Installation Part I

So, this is part one of the toilet installation.  Let me tell you a little bit about my toilet.  Sit back, it’s a long one…

So, here is the story…  About 6 weeks ago, I am finally getting ready to install my toilet, the one received just about a full year earlier…  You can read about it HERE.  A basic run down of the story goes like this though:  I ordered a composting toilet from a ‘reputable dealer’ locally here named Sue.  Sue was found via Sun-Mar’s website and at the time was the only local dealer.  Sue gave me a receipt for the following items:

Centrex 2000 NE Composting Toilet    $1,795.00

Toilet                                                     $   295.00

AF/Waterless Kit                                   $   135.00

Estimated Shipping                               $   200.00

 

Sub-Total                                              $2,425.00

Discount                                              – $   425.00

Balance Due                                          $2,000.00

 

The NE in that model number stands for non-electric… What Sue actually ordered was the electric model (which the company said they cannot even rectify because it was her mistake, though I am past asking for that to be rectified).  The electric version has different (bigger) dimensions and a required plug-load, the main reasons I went with the NON electric… Well that isn’t what I got and I made my peace with that…

 

At the same time I also ordered with it the toilet part and the water-less conversion kit which I was told I would need, that made enough sense to me.  I received one box with the toilet part in it (it arrived broken) and with misc. pieces.   I don’t know exactly what is entailed in the water-less conversion kit (it is not pictured anywhere on the website) but I expected a separate box for it since it was a separate ticket item.  I only ever received the two boxes.  So about a week after receiving it last June I called the ‘reputable dealer’, Sue, and explained that I wouldn’t be installing the toilet in the near future (I did expect to have it installed by this point mind you, but life happens, backs get broken etc…) and that I was concerned that I was missing a piece.  She assured me that everything I needed was in the box with the toilet.  I have not given it a second thought.  All this time the boxes have been sitting in the corner of my dads shop, ready to be installed when I was ready for it, according to the company and their dealer.   

 

NOW, I am getting ready to install the thing, it looks as though I am missing pieces.  Important pieces.  I called the company (directly mostly because Sue is sort of nutty, extreme prepper style), I provided my receipt and explained the whole story and was told that there was nothing that they could do, they show that the items were delivered in two separate shipments eight days apart which I can guarantee  that there was only ever one shipment received.   Aside from that I was told when the shipment was coming so that I could take an hour or two off work to be there when it was delivered, which I did (I was told it would come in one shipment, on a semi, from New York) .  I was never told of two shipments and honestly just don’t believe it.  

 

So their answer… “it’s been a year, there is nothing they can do” after  they ‘did their research’.   Sun-Mar seems to be ok with delivering a sub-par, incomplete and broken product by all accounts. 

 

How on earth a company can see it as acceptable to ship the wrong order both incomplete and broken is beyond me.  What stinks right now though is that I have spent $2,000 and I literally do not have a usable product.  There is no way to install this unless I give Sun-Mar MORE money for something I have already bought.  

 

I feel trapped and swindled most definitely.  I absolutely cannot, in any way, recommend Sun-Mar to anyone, and I would HIGHLY encourage you to avoid their products unless they rectify this situation.  

*update – after contacting the company and explaining the situation further to the president along with sending a copy of the blog I intended to post I was contacted by the head of their customer service department, told that the second package was in fact never signed for and that the other customer service rep should have been able to see that and that I should not have been left hanging like I was with an unusable product and no solution.  They agreed to send me another conversion kit at their expense.  I was told it would be here in a week and a half.  At the week and a half mark I was contacted and told that it was back-ordered and would not be in for another week and a half and then they would ship it to me.  I explained that this has held up my construction for several weeks and asked them if they could over-night it to me so I could install it ASAP since I am already living in my house with no facilities.  I received a response that it would be sent on standard UPS, end of story.  Three weekends passed and then it finally arrived.  Long story short, they did the bare minimum to even get me the pieces I need to make this a functioning composting toilet… I am not impressed.  I debated back and  forth on whether or not to post this but transparency has always been key for me and this build is no exception.   I feel like my experience is going to be helpful to someone.  I am just in shock at how their business is ran, even if they did do the bare minimum to make things right,  I still ended up with the wrong unit and a broken toilet.  Though soon I hope to be able to use my own bathroom, it will be nice not to have to make nightly trips to James’s house, especially as the pregnancy continues further.

Oh yeah, I’m pregnant! 😉 (more on that later)

 

Thank you everyone for letting me vent. 

That all being said here are some pictures of its installation part one as well as a few extras including my electrical closet doors and some Denny!  At the bottom there are a couple of links to some videos of Denny going up and down the stairs!  I can’t figure out how to embed them… the internet is hard sometimes 😉

First the fun stuff! My oldest brother turned 34 and we had a great birthday celebration on Sunday, I met lots of fun people! Lindsay also had a birthday so it was a big bash! Happy birthday Dan!

a-dor-able! 🙂

It's been a while since I've done an overview too so I just want to show a couple quick shots inside my house, here is the kitchen which is still awaiting its shelves being hung. Soon... always 'soon' 🙂

And a view back to the living/bed area.

And my favorite spot in the whole place, my bed. I love that Denny can now get up and down just fine, we both spend a lot of time hanging out up there reading and whatnot. There are some videos at the end of this of Denny going up and down, he's much better at up but he's getting pretty good at down too!

And another side project I will be starting on as soon as we get out of the 100+ degree days! My City, Meridian (have I mentioned how awesome they are?) is doing a vermicomposting project and I am lucky enough to partake! I have heard great things about it but never really dabbled, well now is my chance!

I just wanted to put the content of this pamphlet online so I can go back to it later.

And the inside.

So the City has lent me this Can-O-Worms which is ideal for growing and housing my worms, I will break it apart very soon and show you all how it works!

The base I will be using is this material

mixed with this material. It will be a great learning experience and I am excited to share more about Vermicomposting!

Denny after a long day of working on the electrical closet doors

He's still up for a trick though! Here is proof that he knows 'shake', he's very good at it! 🙂

Onto the closet door making... The two larger openings are the frames for the doors that will open, the small on is just a panel that will stay in place. You'll see why I had to do this configuration when I go to mount them.

And some middle supports.

Then for shear I just used some scraps of thin plywood I had leftover from making my media center.

After I glued the frames together James screwed these pieces on

and wa-la!

Denver was also lots of help as you can see (I kinda love that he doesn't mind the loud sounds that power tools make, he just chills out so long as he can be close to us he's cool 🙂

Two panels

and three!

So... onto the toilet... this is the amount of tools you need to install a Sun-Mar

And this

and this, I swear we used most if not ALL of them... given I have a tile floor and floor system that is just over a foot thick that we needed to put a 10" hole in... still, it was a ridiculous amount of needed tools....

Starting out, sweeping the floor, which desperately needs a mop!

Sketching the pipe on where it needs to go so we can cut it out

To cut through the 2 inches of mortar and tile we (dad) used a grinder with a masonry wheel on it

zoom zoom, it took about 4 seconds to fill the entire house with white dust, and at the end there was a layer on EVERYTHING, even the bed...

Insta dust!

first layer, check! now the mortar.

I was sure not to lay my radiant heat near where the toilet would be set so I was not concerned about shorting that out by cutting the wires..

Second layer, check!

Then the wood floorboard, if you remember I used 2 3/4" sheets to make the floor extra rigid AND to spare some fancy detail work for my walls, it happened to fit my trailer perfect and the wood was essentially donated in the perfect quantity for a double layer.

Holes drilled, then we used a saws-all to finish it off

Chunk-o-wood, there is my floor.

and the radiant barrier that Jason ever so generously donated!

Just used a utility knife for that one 🙂

then insulation, started that with a utility knife but then decided saws-all was going to be better.

mostly just man handling this stuff...

one layer out.

Two layers out, I actually forgot there were three layers of insulation in the floor... I was surprised to see another layer under there.

We got it out though, now its just the plywood on the bottom which we marked by drilling three holes in, then dad went under the house and saws-alled the rest out

Here the holes are drilled

then it's cut!

I now have a pretty gigantic hole in my bathroom floor 🙂

a close up of the layers...

and from underneath.

Now fitting the toilet piece, we made it too small! So we got the sawsall out again and went to town enlarging it.

Here it the toilet part turned upside down, that black piece has to fit through the floor and attached to the unit below, it clearly isn't long enough.

which is where the conversion kit comes in, it has an extender piece which is necessary to link them together...

here we have measured the length of piece needed and have cut it to size, dad is shaving off the burrs

That extendor piece hooks up to this black portion and then into the composting unit below.

Here the black extension is sitting in place and just needs the toilet to connect on top.

In order to connect the two we had to take the toilet portion apart to fasten it to the floor. They used both fillips head screws and square screws to do this so you needed a couple tools just to take this apart, i thought that was dumb.

Here is the portion that fastens to the floor

and how it fastens, we drilled holes through the tiles and bolted in four spots.

and then re-attached the toilet.

I thought getting the unit unde rthe house would be far trickier than it was, it was already dug deep enough with the tractor from when we parked the trailer, just had to remove a little so we could clear the corner!

You can see the heating element and drawer on this side as well as the crank which I have to leave semi accessible. I will build a little skirt around this so that it will still function well in the winter with a little 'roof' area that can be lifted to crank

cleared the corner and now to line it up with the toilet, it is a gravity unit so it has to be directly underneath...

Getting it leveled and aligned, this gap in the floor will be sprayed with sprayfoam so that no animals live up there!

and wa-la, it's placed. We ran out of time to hook up the vent and get it in working order.

The toilet came in broken so I have to buy a replacement toilet seat and here is another part that came chipped.. Nothing like paying 300 bucks for broken goods... I refuse to give Sun-Mar any more of my money though which means my seat may not match the unit, I noticed it has already yellowed from the limited sun it has had. my guess is that I will be re-doing this toilet into something more cool looking and less standard eventually. I'm wondering cob... or some really cool steel something... the good part is that the black part of the toilet is the guts of it, it's all good. I'll just change out the rest of it eventually, I was really trying to get a 'standard' looking toilet, it seems not worth it though. I'll just make it weird :).

And also, don't be jealous, I saw Vanilla Ice this weekend with my friend Carissa! It was rockin! Not really, he wasn't at least, the rest of the event was pretty cool though!

Thanks for the date Carissa!

And I also had a house guest, a little yellow escape artists, Tobi came and chilled out with Denny and I for the week while my folks were out of town.

And who would I be without a Denver update, look at the little guy, he's up to 40 pounds now and 14 weeks old!

He's a playful little worm

He LOVES the grass, I don't have very good grass yet for him so we go on lots of walks.

And his eyes changed colors, I was hoping they would stay blue foever but I kinda like the grey color too. The gene that makes him a 'blue' works by muting down all of his pigment including his eyes, most danes have hazel to brown eyes (except the occasional mutant with blue eyes), since it mutes all his pigment, otherwise he would be black, it makes his eyes a really light yellowy grey tone

I think he's pretty cute! Definitely a REALLY good dog! Be sure to watch the videos linked below if you want to see what a claud he is! He's really trying to work on the coordination!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or3vJELu-9o&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uouR8RuSh8&feature=youtu.be