Homestead, NY

Excel-NE, Installed 1996

Letter from Linda Ochs:

One of the features I like about the Sun-Mar non-electric unit is the fact that it uses no electricity or water which saves hundreds of thousands of gallons of water as well as no additional electrical loads. Our house runs on solar power for electricity so this is an important feature.

Mother Nature composts naturally and this product follows along this guideline. Our society has a crazy system of dirtying clean water with our waste, shipping it to a treatment plant, adding potentially deadly chemicals to "clean it up", and then put it back into our waterways again. This system is not an effective or efficient way to deal with our wastes. If we could get the idea of composting as THE way to deal with waste disposal we could save hundreds of thousands of gallons of water from going through the "business as usual" system.

I also wouldn't mind my photo that I am sending with this letter being used in your millenium catalog. I tell all my friends about my system and give tours of my home so people can see the environmentally friendly items that do exist and can be incorporated into their homes. I put cedar closet boards behind the unit to help control possible odors/insect problems and decorated the stack air vent with a silk ivy garland to make it blend in better with the decor.

There are two full-time residents at our house so this unit works pretty well for our needs. Visiting friends and relatives are surprised there is no big odor problem and how simple the composting idea is.

The problem I see with most "new" or "different" environmentally friendly products is that society does not like change. We are used to the status quo and don't want to have to do things differently. Nor do we want to know what happens to our waste. A flush takes care of everything, we think. I urge people to take a tour of the sewer plants in their area and really see what happens to our resources. I try to encourage people to take some kind of responsibility for their wastes and this is one way they can do that. I haven't had anyone actually purchase one to date, and the most common answer is that they are very expensive compared to a standard system. Maybe if they had to pay their sewer bills out of their pocket instead of being hid in their tax bill, they might see the true cost and change their minds. That's what I hope for.

-Linda S. Ochs