It has failed and leaked raw sewage three (3) times now. The first failure was the very first time it was used (after about 4 or 5 days’ part-time use)!

What happens is the heater t-stat fails. The toilet relies on both heat and air flow to evaporate excess liquid. When the heater fails, there is no warning. Liquid builds up in the base and when it reaches the bottom of the clean out drawer it leaks out onto the floor. That’s your first and only indication that something is wrong.

Sun-Mar’s response has been to replace the t-stat — leaving us to clean up a foul disgusting mess and deal with the resulting property damage. They act like they are doing us a favor.

Keep in mind that our Excel is installed in a guest room above our garage. It gets very little use — nowhere near the 3/4 adults fulltime that Sun-Mar claims its capacity to be.

Based on our experience I cannot imagine that the NE would work any better. After all, it has no fan and no heater. Each time ours failed the fan was still working, so it had as much or more airflow as the NE would under ideal conditions.

These toilets do have an “emergency drain”. We were told several times by a Sun-Mar authorized dealer that there was no reason to
hook it up unless we were going to be overloading the toilet or there were extended power outages (neither is the case). Now, after the sale, Sun-Mar is saying that it should be hooked up.

Here’s the problem — we would not have purchased the Excel if we had known we would have to rely on the emergency drain, for several reasons:

1) It is against our local health department regulations. Frederick County, MD, does not even allow grey water systems and this
is BLACK water, urine and feces.

2) We live on a mountain. Most of the land in our area will not pass a ‘perc test’. In many cases people cannot build because a septic system simply will not work.

3) Even _if_ we could get permission from Frederick County to install the “recycling bed” (aka cesspool), the soil is clay and rock. Digging is extremely difficult.

4) Due to the nature of the soil, the slope, and the fact that water typically runs down the mountain just under the surface, a “recycling bed” (essentially a small cesspool) would likely be an unsanitary health hazard.

5) In the winter the drain line would freeze and we would have the same problem.

Sun-Mar’s dirty (literally) little secret is that their toilets are not fail-safe. There is no warning that the heater has failed and/or that liquid is building up in the base. Therefore, the “emergency” drain must be connected. I repeat, it MUST be connected.

This puts Sun-Mar in a tight spot. If they were honest and told prospective customers the truth — that the drain must be connected to a home-made cesspool to prevent indoor ‘haz-mat’ spills — it would cut into their sales because many/most people in the US could not legally do that. Many prospective customers who aren’t necessarily concerned with the law would still be unwilling to buy a Sun-Mar because of the work/cost involved in digging a cesspool and installing a drain line between it and the toilet, below the frost line (generally 32″ or deeper depending on location). Others may be willing to ignore the law and willing to do the work (or pay a contractor) but do not have the proper soil conditions (the ground will not absorb the moisture).

Sun-Mar is fully aware of all of this. They have chosen to mislead people. The owner of Sun-Mar apparently thinks that by “suggesting” or “recommending” that the drain be connected they are covered. If a county, state, or federal agency says anything Sun-Mar can legitimately claim that they did not say the drain _must_ be connected. If a customer (like yours truly) has a toilet that fails (over, and over again) causing putrid raw sewage to leak onto the floor, Sun-Mar can point to their literature and say that they ‘recommend’ that the drain be connected.

The bottom line is this:

The Sun-Mar Excel does work, most of the time. It is a pretty good design, but it has a fatal flaw — it is not fail-safe. No piece of equipment is perfect. Everything has failures eventually (or immediately in my case). That’s to be expected. A well designed composting toilet should be fail-safe — it should produce an audible and/or visible alarm when there is a failure. There is simply no excuse not to have some indication that there has been a failure that will result in unsafe, unsanitary leakage of urine and feces into a living space where children and pets could come in contact with it.

For that reason, the design of the Sun-Mar Excel (and many/all of their other toilets) is unacceptable. I am shocked that it received and still has NSF certification. It makes me wonder how seriously to take the NSF. I have to wonder if their “certification” can be bought.

My wife and I are now considering an Eco-let toilet, but I don’t know enough about them to recommend them just yet.

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