Toilets on Narrowboats

Clearly the most important thing. Never mind if your boat is about to sink, so long as you can pee in peace all will be well with the world.

There are two options. The pump-out and the cassette. When you're looking at adverts some will give the manufacturer, some will give the specifics of the toilet. 'Macerator'. 'Flushing'. 'Mansfield Traveller'. In a year or two I'll have used all my new boating friends' toilets, in the name of research, and I'll report back.

But for now, the important thing is do you want a pump out or a cassette. Here's what I've learned. Firstly, people with cassette toilets will look down their nose at you if you have a pump out. Clearly you are not embracing the narrowboat life as you should. On the other hand, people with pump outs will hoist their noses into the air if you have a cassette. So you can't really win and should probably just not bother and use the pub toilets instead.

Cassette toilets have a small cassette which when full has to be emptied by you. It looks a bit like one of those suitcases on wheels, you wheel it up the towpath to an Elsan point and empty it out. This could need doing anywhere from 1 to 3 days. Or if you're using the pub toilets, hardly ever. It's free to empty it and apparently after the first try - for which you'll need a change of clothes - you will get the hang of it and it will be a quick and easy and clean job to do. If a little monotonous.

Pump out toilets tend to look a bit more like the toilet you're used to in your house. Although not always. These toilets are connected to a large tank somewhere on the boat. This will take a couple of weeks to fill up, maybe longer. When full, you drive the boat to a marina, connect your tank up to it's pump out facility, and well, pump it out. You have to pay for this privilege, at the time of writing the cost is around £15.

Something to consider is either one of the options filling up when you are unable to empty. With the cassette this might be because you are poorly. You might have spent the day filling up the cassette and the last thing you want to do is be heading up the towpath with a suitcase on wheels. Really you just want somewhere to throw up again. Which is fine with a pump out if it isn't also full. The canal froze two weeks ago and you're going nowhere, least of all to the nearest marina to empty your tank.

So some people have both, a pump out for the main toilet and a cassette for backup. You can keep the cassette toilet in a cupboard somewhere. You can have two cassettes, if you like. Or three.

Another thing to consider is the location of the toilet tank. On quite a few boats it's under the fixed double bed. This can make things awkward if you are considering changing the layout of the boat. Tanks can be removed, but it is not an easy job. It's worth bearing in mind that some boats advertised as having cassette toilets, will in fact have pump out tanks in them, it's just that the current owner has disconnected it as they prefer to use a cassette toilet. Ex hire boats, those that have come from narrowboat holiday companies, always have pump out tanks.

In the end, it is true that if you fall in love with a boat but it has the 'wrong' toilet, you will either change the toilet, or you will change your mind about the toilet.