How to Use the Toilet When the Water Is Off (The Two-Bucket Method)

How to Use the Toilet When the Water Is Off (The Two-Bucket Method)

Stop flushing. A toilet doesn't need mains pressure to flush — it needs water in the cistern, and once that's gone it's a bowl. If the drains are intact you can flush manually by pouring about 6–8 litres of any non-drinking water straight into the bowl. If you're not certain the drains are intact, don't: use a lined bucket instead, and keep two of them.

This is the least discussed part of any outage and the one that makes people ill. Worth ten minutes now.

First question: can you still flush?

Manual flushing works, and it's the simplest option — pour a bucket of water fast and directly into the bowl (not the cistern) and the siphon does the rest. Rainwater, bathwater, pool water, anything non-potable.

Do not do it if any of these apply:

• There's been flooding, or sewers in the area have backed up
• There's been an earthquake or visible ground movement
• Your septic tank is full, or its drain field is waterlogged
• Waste water is rising in any drain, shower tray or sink in the house
• Authorities have said not to use the sewers

In those cases, water going down pushes sewage back up — into your own bathroom. Go straight to buckets.

Also: don't waste drinking water on flushing. Water for drinking is a separate and much more urgent budget — see how much water to store per person.

The two-bucket method

One bucket for urine. One for solids. This separation is the whole trick, and almost nobody knows it: mixed waste is what produces the smell, fast. Kept apart, a solids bucket stays tolerable for days.

What you need — all of it cheap, all of it storable in a cupboard:

• Two sturdy buckets with tight lids (about 20 litres). Label them. Never mix them up.
• Heavy-duty bin liners to line the solids bucket — doubled.
• Cover material: sawdust, wood ash, cat litter, dry soil, or shredded cardboard.
• A snap-on toilet seat lid for a bucket, if you want comfort. Optional. A bucket works.
• Soap.

How to run it:

1. Line the solids bucket with two bags. Keep the urine bucket unlined.
2. After every single use of the solids bucket, cover it with a scoop of your cover material until the contents are hidden. This is not optional — uncovered waste means flies, and flies walk from waste to food. That is exactly how dysentery moves through a household where nobody appears to have done anything wrong.
3. Lid on, every time.
4. Urine is nearly sterile and is the easy one: it can be diluted heavily and poured outside, well away from any water source and away from where anyone walks.
5. When the solids bag is about two-thirds full, tie it off twice, and store it outside in a lidded bin until services return. Don't fill a bag so heavy you can't lift it cleanly.

If you have a garden and the outage is a long one, waste can be buried — a pit at least 30 paces from any water source, and always downhill of it. Water flows downhill and so does disease. Arrange things so that both only ever flow away from where you drink.

The part that actually saves people: handwashing

Here's the uncomfortable truth of sanitation. In the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan refugee crisis, in the camps around Goma, something close to fifty thousand people died in roughly the first month — most of them not from the violence they'd fled, but from cholera and dysentery, on ground shared with their own waste.

The disease travelled the same road it always travels: a trace of infected waste, far too small to see, reaching another person's mouth by way of water, food, hands or flies.

Which means the single highest-value item in this entire article is a bar of soap. It's the cheapest disease-prevention tool ever made, and it's the first thing that runs out when nobody planned for it.

Set up a handwashing point right next to the buckets, on the way out — not somewhere sensible down the hall that people intend to use and don't. A jug rigged to pour a thin stream, a sliver of soap, done. Hand sanitiser is a reasonable backup, but it works poorly on visibly soiled hands, so soap and water first where you can.

Keep clean and dirty apart

Three zones, and they never touch:

And if someone gets ill — watery diarrhoea, fever — separate them early. Give them their own vessels and their own bucket, and put one person in charge of caring for them who washes thoroughly afterwards. The sick shed the heaviest dose. One case handled carelessly becomes the whole household's case inside a week.

The thing that kills in that scenario is dehydration, not the bug. Oral rehydration salts are cheap, weigh nothing, and last for years. Keep a few sachets. In their absence, the improvised version is roughly six level teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt in a litre of clean water.

Do this today

Put a box in a cupboard with: two lidded buckets, a roll of heavy-duty bags, a bag of cat litter or sawdust, two bars of soap, and a few sachets of oral rehydration salts. Total cost is roughly a takeaway meal, and there is no preparedness item with a better ratio of cost to consequence.

Then find out one thing while it's easy: where your water shut-off valve is, and whether you're on mains sewer or a septic tank. The answer changes what you're allowed to flush, and you don't want to be working it out by torchlight.

Clean water, waste kept far from it, hands washed, the sick rehydrated. This is a condensed version of the sanitation reference in After Doomsday: The Complete Preparedness Manual, which covers latrine siting, greywater, vector control and outbreak management in full.

— Ryan T. Hale

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