How To Clean Your Composting Toilet Pee Bottle
Disclosure: The company mentioned in this post did not sponsor us.
Those of you who have a composting toilet, you already know how gross the pee bottle can get. For those who aren’t fortunate enough to know first-hand, let me get you acquainted.
When you peek inside a used pee bottle, you’ll notice the interior walls are covered in a yellowish-brown scale. Almost like a ring around a tub, but instead of soap scum and dead skin, it’s from dried pee and the minerals in our urine. The dried pee eventually flakes off and gets poured out when the bottle is emptied, resembling gigantic flakes of fish food. The build-up is from pee sloshing while driving and then drying on the walls.
This makes the pee bottle gross, smelly, and difficult to see how full the bottle is.
Hy-ko Porcelain Brite is an effective cleaning solution for our compost toilet pee bottle.
The two main composting toilet companies both recommend cleaning the bottle out with mixture of vinegar and water. We’ve filled our pee bottle with vinegar and (hot) water, swooshed it around, let it soak and then poured it out. It wasn’t effective for us.
We’ve also added rocks to that mixture, shook and poured. No change. We’ve left the rocks in the bottle and driven 50+ miles, hoping that’ll clean the sides. Nope.
We’d kind of given up hope on ever having a clean pee bottle again, until we were in Vernal, UT. There was a plumbing and janitorial store in town that we drove by. Jerud decided to go in to see if they might have any recommendations. They recommended a product by Hy-Ko called Porcelain Brite. We tried it out and were pleasantly surprised that it worked!
Directions on how to use Porcelain Brite.
Porcelain Brite isn’t a composting-toilet-specific product. The back of the bottle says it’s made to remove soap scum, water deposits, scales and other deposits from toilet bowls, urinals, shower walls, etc. Directions say to add 1 part Porcelain Brite to 5 parts water. Apply with a brush or cloth (obviously, we didn’t do that and just poured the mixture into our pee bottle). Let it sit for one minute and then rinse with water.
We filled about half of our pee bottle with the mixture, let it sit for a minute or three, shook it around, let it sit again, and then poured it out. The mixture does foam up a lot, so don’t fill your entire pee bottle with it! While not all of the scaling came off the walls, a very good amount it did.
The back of the bottle doesn’t list the ingredients, but Hy-Ko’s website said, “A 28% phosphoric Acid, detergent and emulsifiers unite to quickly remove water minerals, scale, rust, soap scum and filth from toilet bowl, skins, glass, urinals and showers.” I haven’t been able to find any other information about this product, so I don’t know how environmentally friendly this is. But I don’t recommend dumping this out in the woods just to be safe and respectful. Please empty it in a toilet or at an RV dump station.
I haven’t looked for this product again since Vernal, so I don’t know how easy it is to find it. There are two places you can buy it online when I did a quick search: this one and this one. Neither are Amazon.
Let me know if you’ve come across anything else that’s effective in cleaning out a composting toilet pee bottle!
