Boat Head Service

Boat Heads

Our old boat has a real porcelain toilet or head in it. It looks like any 30 plus year old toilet you would find in a bathroom in a house of the same vintage except for the pump handle on the side and no tank for water.

You do not think much about something like the head if it is working. Just like in a house though, when it stops working right, you realize it can be a big problem. With a land toilet, if it will not flush, you can get a bucket of water and dump the water in the bowl and the stuff washes away. You cannot do that on the boat toilet. 

Our old toilet has a manual lever you move up and down. Like a manual bilge pump, it sucks in from one side and pushes stuff out the other side. When seals go it will not work. It is a double action pump set up. When you lift the handle water is pulled into the pump cylinder and water is pushed into the bowl. At the same time, when the handle is brought up stuff in the bowl is sucked out the bottom and pushed to the holding tank. By moving the handle up and down a flow is created that empties the bowl of waste water and replaces it with clean water. Back flow valves in the system, keeps the flow all going in one direction.

This set up lets you flush even if the boat is underway and is heeled over and will not let water into the boat even if the toilet lays below the waterline because of the heel. When the boat is heeled over like that, you do not want to use the head if you do not have to. Staying on the toilet can be a problem, Your Butt will most likely get wet from water in the bowl, and flushing can be a big job…

If a seal goes the system cannot work and the first thing you do is close the valves that go in and out of the toilet to prevent any leaks.

Repairing the system is not hard, but it can be smelly and messy. Replace all the seals when you service the head pump assembly. You get everything in the service kit that you need for the job except the tools and elbow grease. Disassembly and reassembly is straight forward. My wife showed me how to do the job. She said that her X husband had shown her how to do it and then told her she could do the job the next time it had to be done. With a big smile, she told me the same thing, BUT she said she would help. *-) (The kit has very good instructions with it.) 

I will say that doing the service on her boat toilet set up is not bad because everything is easy to get at. I have seen other boat setups that would be very unpleasant to work on because of inaccessibility. Working on her boat system is easier than working on our house toilets. Nothing works right on them for any length of time. 

I had thought about replacing the boat set up with a newer one, but when I looked into it I decided that I was asking for more trouble and expense than it would be worth. Our system is mostly trouble free.

Cheap As... Toilet Paper

The toilet paper that you need to use with a boat toilet must be able to breakdown easily so it will go through the boat plumbing to the holding tank and so it can be pumped out of the holding tank. The TP often is a one ply paper and is not soft and plushy like many brands of TP.

After living on board a boat for a number of years, the TP was not a big deal.  When we moved on shore to a house with a septic tank system, we did not change the TP because we figured it would be better for the septic system to breakdown the one ply TP. It was not a big deal.

When my sister came to visit us at our on shore home (She never visited us when we were on the boat) it was an experience my wife and I had not expected. We had moved into the house a few months before. The previous owner had a child, and the one bedroom had little kid curtains on the window. We had left them up, and it was our guest bedroom and we did not use it for much anyway. She took down the kid curtains, made a list of window treatments we needed to get, re arranged the bathroom at that end of the house and told us how the minimal furniture we had should be arranged. We both could hardly wait till she had to go home.

When she told me in an undiplomatic way that I did not need to bring CHEAP AS… TP home form my job for the bath room and I should buy my own TP. My wife and I were dumbfounded. When my wife told her that she had bought the TP, that it was the type we used on the boat and that it was the type recommended for septic tanks, my sister just looked at us as if we were crazy. She said that she had bought “real TP” for us and we could put what we had back on the boat.

When she comes to visit now we put “real TP” in the back bathroom for her. 8-) The guest bedroom still has no curtains, it is the “cat” room now and the cats destroy any window curtains in the room. That’s our story and we stick to it. (Thank you Cats!)

Every time we have to change a roll of TP we think of “Cheap As…TP” and smile. 8-)

I found the perfect Gift for my sister...A FISHING REEL  TP holder for REAL TP.