We’re talking about the dirty, stinky, nasty van life toilet options today. Okay, maybe those adjectives are a bit much, but when you get down to it, van toilets are a bit gross. Albeit gross, having a van toilet is an absolute must in any long-term van build.
Now, here’s the thing, I say long-term van build because we got away without having a toilet in our first van for months before actually getting a proper van toilet. And let’s keep in mind, that’s with Jason having Crohn’s disease and using the bathroom more often than the average joe. There are so many alternatives to using the bathroom in something other than a “van life toilet”, that you may be surprised to know, van toilets don’t get used as often as you’d think.
Bodies are incredible, and they get on schedules that work with your life schedule. Think about it… honestly think about where and when you use the bathroom on a normal everyday basis. Then think how when your schedule was different than it is now, how did your bathroom schedule change? It really does go with the flow and adapts to your daily life.
All that to say, you still need to figure out how and when you can and will be doing your duty on the road. Let’s get into some van life toilet options, and then get into specific toilets for inside your campervan.
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Alternative Van Life Toilet Options | Where to Find Toilets Outside of a Typical Van Toilet
Public Bathrooms
We don’t just mean bathrooms like at a rest area. We’re talking about public bathrooms in stores, in most downtown areas, harbors, parks, college campuses, shoot even trailheads often have public bathrooms. When living in a van, especially with Crohn’s disease, you become acutely aware of the number of bathrooms that are actually open to the public!
Top tip when using public bathrooms?!… Bring your own toilet wipes and hand sanitizer. You never know when the bathroom won’t be stocked with toilet paper, plus wipes make you feel cleaner.. and hand sanitizer is always a must after using a public bathroom.. even if you wash your hands after using the toilet! There are also toilet seat covers made for travel you can grab if you’re worried about sitting your hiney on the actual toilet seat!
Restaurants
Using restaurant bathrooms goes hand in hand with your body getting on a schedule of using the loo, as well as your body just knowing when a bathroom’s available and not. Never leave a restaurant without using the bathroom. Heck, even pop into a restaurant to use the loo. While some restaurants have codes to use their bathrooms, most are open to walk right on in. I wouldn’t make it a habit to use restaurant bathrooms without actually eating or drinking there. However, when push comes to shove, and you’re in a pinch, restaurant bathrooms are normally cleaner than your typical public toilets.
Friends’ Houses
Get comfortable right now with taking a big, fat dump at your friends’ and families’ homes! You’ll be living in a van for goodness sake! And trust us, going pee and definitely poop in a real toilet that flushes that you don’t have to dump is waaaaaayyyy nicer than using a van toilet! They poop in their toilet, so you can too! If you’re worried about leaving a not so great smell behind, grab one of these and keep it in your pocket. Poo-Pourri works wonders.. and they won’t even know you just wrecked their toilet, unless you totally own it and shout it from the rooftops! 😉
24 Hour Stores
When overnight parking in cities without a van toilet, make it a habit to park near 24-hour stores, restaurants, or casinos! When we were living in our van full time while Jay went to graduate school in Scotland, we parked within walking distance to ASDA (the UK version of Walmart in America), and we used that toilet loads of times. 24 hour buildings are easy to go in and use the loo at any point day or night. They also typically have security, which is always a plus when living in a van.
If traveling in the states, oftentimes, places like Walmart or casinos will allow you to park right in their parking lot for the night. That gives you easy access to using their toilets and other amenities!
In the Woods
No better place to be when nature calls than in nature itself! Grab a trowel, toilet paper, and a plastic bag. Walk 200 feet from roads, water, and trails. Dig a hole 6 inches deep. Go to the bathroom. Put your toilet paper in the bag. Bury your poop, then cover it with more moss, leaves, sticks, or rocks. Throw away your used toilet paper in a proper trash bin. Sanitize your hands.
It’s that easy. Just please, poop in the wilderness properly! We filmed an entire video on this, showcasing places that people don’t poop in the woods properly.. now to just make it to share with you how important it is to pack out your toilet paper and bury your turds!
Gyms
Gyms in the vanlife world mean more than just a place to work out. While they scream showers to most people living in a van, they also scream flushable toilets! Grab a gym membership, like a Planet Fitness membership in the States, or just do a pay as you use kind of thing if you don’t think you’ll be using a gym often. Get your body moving and the bowels will start moving too!
Work or School
Living in a van while working seasonal jobs or even city jobs, or going to school is becoming more and more popular! We lived in our first van for two years while Jay completed a master’s program in Scotland, and the university campus was the place we used most for a bathroom in the van. We would not only use the university toilets but their showers too!
Plan drinking your coffee on the way to work/school or just as you get to work/school. That way, when the caffeine hits and it’s time for you to go, you’ll have a nice clean bathroom right at your fingertips!
Van Life Toilets | The Best Van Toilets for Inside a Campervan.. Is There Such a Thing?
Honestly, when picking out a van toilet for your campervan conversion, it’s a truly personal choice. There are so many campervan toilet options and I don’t think it’s a one size fits all kind of topic. Honestly, anyone who says there’s a single best portable campervan toilet is lying. Of all the campervan toilets out there, there’s a reason they all differ.. people’s camper van toilet needs differ drastically!
You have to consider things like…
- How much space do you have for a toilet?
- How tall is your van? What height of a toilet can you get to sit on it without your head touching the roof?
- If you want to tuck your van toilet away, how big of a space do you have for a camper van toilet to fit?
- How often will you be using the toilet?
- Will you have access to actually dump the toilet, or only access to throw away your poop and pee bags?
- Do you produce massive turds that won’t really “flush” down a typical van toilet?
- Will you have a black water tank or waste tank?
You see… there are so many things to consider when choosing the best toilet for van life for you. While we can’t say what’s truly the best toilet for van life, we will give you options, most of which we’ve used, and a few that we’ve read and heard great things about from other vanlifers, but haven’t used ourselves…
DIY 5 Gallon Bucket Toilet
After living in our van for about a month without a toilet, we were on a trip and found a 5-gallon bucket next to a trash can. We thought, hey, that would make a great emergency toilet! And low and behold, with a simple black trash bag put in the bucket, we had our first van toilet! The toilet didn’t have a lid, and was simply just a bucket, but if we were close to a trash can, we always had a place to go to the bathroom “in private” within our van, and then pop out of the van and toss the bathroom biproducts.
We will say, this toilet wasn’t the most comfortable thing.. sitting on the edge of a 5-gallon bucket leaves some interesting creases in your backside, so we added a pool noodle to the toilet. This was an easy job. Simply cut the pool noodle to the diameter of the bucket, then make a slice all the way down to noodle, for the rim of the bucket to sit on… and ta-da.. you’ve got yourself a simple, cheap, and easy emergency van toilet!
Obviously, without a lid, this thing was gross fast. Even with us lining it with trash bags when in use and spraying essential oils inside. So, we upgraded to a “proper” 5-gallon bucket toilet after just a couple of weeks of using our DIY van toilet!
“Proper” 5 Gallon Bucket Toilet
Admittedly, we were a bit embarrassed to tell people we not only peed, but pooped in a trash bag and threw it away in public garbage cans. The thought of it still doesn’t sit that well with me, and yet, we’ve realized it’s a really popular thing in the van and travel world! We didn’t realize that until we came across a “proper” 5-gallon bucket van toilet at a hardware store in Scotland.
The proper bucket toilets come complete with a toilet seat lid that shuts, so you can use it multiple times without having to toss it. Just be sure that if you leave pee or poop in the bucket, it’s secure before you begin driving — nobody wants that accident all over their van!
You can get an entire 5-gallon bucket toilet set up online, commonly referred to as the luggable loo. Is it weird I think that’s a cute name for a toilet? In stores like Walmart, you can snag the toilet lid part and put it on a 5-gallon bucket you have at home!
{Top Van Toilet Tip… put some essential oils on a piece of toilet paper or paper towel, and leave it under the trashbags you line the toilet with. This will help mask the smell of the loo! You can also add your compost and other trash to the toilet to make you seem less like you’re literally just throwing away poop!}
Pop Up Toilet
When Jay got really sick a few years back and we couldn’t leave the house without him having to go the bathroom multiple times anywhere we went, we purchased this pop-up portable toilet and have loved it since. We always have it with us when we travel. It makes a great toilet for emergency uses! The entire thing fits into a small bag, where you can also store things like trash bags, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer. That way, you can grab the bag and set up the toilet outside the van when camping, and just use the body of your van to provide privacy.
A pop-up toilet would be perfect for those with an extremely limited amount of space in their van builds, and those who think they’ll use public bathrooms or nature more often than not. You can also snag a pop-up privacy bathroom tent, and always set up your toilet outside the van wherever you are if using a toilet in the van grosses you out!
Kids Collapsible Toilet
My sister has one of these for my niece and nephew so they don’t have to use a public porta potti. And honestly, I’d be lying if I said all the adults haven’t used it in the back of the car a time or two! These collapsible toilets are similar to the pop-up toilet I mentioned above, but they take up even less space, and have bags that come with them that have a soaking up pad inside to soak up more of the liquids! They’re cute and tiny, probably best for smaller people to use!
Portable Toilet for Van
We got a portable travel toilet (aka a cassette toilet) for our current van, and honestly, love it. It’s surprisingly comfortable to sit on, can hide away really easily, and doesn’t smell!
With great reviews online, and cassette toilets being a popular toilet for van builds that we’ve seen over and over again in all our research, we went ahead and bought one even with our hesitation of needing the toilet for poop not just pee. With Jay having Crohn’s disease, his toilet needs for poop are multiple times a day, so we were a bit nervous the Camco Portable Toilet wouldn’t hold in the smell or be easy to dump with more solids than the average user.
However, we were pleasantly surprised with the Camco Portable Toilet! We use essential oils in the toilet bowl and down in the black water container to mask the smell of the bathroom, and always throw away our toilet paper instead of flushing it down the toilet for easier dumping. Jay always does the dumping for us, and he’s said it hasn’t been too bad yet! AND… it’s super easy to find proper free dump stations! A lot of van life apps, like Sekr, share where there are nearby dump stations. And we’ve found the gas station Maverik here in the west, more often than not has both a free dump station and free potable water!
Composting Toilet
After hearing about composting toilets while living in our first van, we were dead set on putting a self contained composting toilet in our second van build. That was until we actually researched composting toilets. We saw the $1,000 yes, one-thousand dollar price point, and learned how the maintenance on them works and decided, hard pass. The price point and size were two major deterrents for us with our minivan build.
With that said, the people that have composting toilets rave about them and say they’re the best things ever. I think when we do another van build in a larger van, we’ll probably up the game to this Nature’s Head composting toilet, as they seem to be better for using for pee and poop.
If you’re considering a composting toilet, be sure to consider the size and weight of the toilet, and the need to carry composting materials with you, as well as the 24-hour fan that runs to help remove the gases released in the composting process. Do your research before getting a composting toilet for your van toilet!
The Van Life Toilet Recap
Honestly, if you haven’t caught on by now, there’s no perfect solution for a van life toilet. It honestly irritates the crud out of me when I read posts about the “best” toilet for van life! Specifically from people who haven’t even tried multiple different toilets. We’ve had our fair share of using all but the composting toilet mentioned above, and can say that each one has its perks and downfalls. Consider where you’ll be traveling in your van to decide what kind of toilet will work best for you!
We’re happy to share with you our converted sprinter van and converted minivan toilet experiences. And, only hope you make the best van toilet choice that suits your needs! Truly consider what is best for you, then enjoy the dirty bits of van life — using and abusing your toilet! 😉