TidyHut topic of March inventors' meeting

SANDPOINT — When camping, attending a festival or other event, it is not easy to ignore the state of the portable toilets that typically adorn those venues.

Erik Nelson of Spokane decided to take his wife camping about two years ago. In an effort to find a campground with flushing toilets, the couple went to Glacier National Park. Unfortunately, Nelson said, it was Fourth of July weekend, so the campground was full. So they drove up to Canada to a campground with a portable toilet. His wife looked at it and told him and told Nelson, "No, you are driving me to town."

A few trips to town, followed by a hotel stay, led Nelson to wonder why there was not a better, cleaner option for portable toilets.

"We have smart phones, we have smart cars, we've got access to internet all over the world, but we are still basically doing our business in a bucket and hoping that the backsplash doesn't hit us," Nelson said.

So for the past two years he has been working on the invention of the TidyHut, trademarked and patent-pending, which Nelson deemed the "world's first non-disgusting toilet."

The first thing he did, he said, was research. Nelson has a master's degree from University of California, Berkeley, and while working for a governor in Massachusetts, part of his job was "deep dive" research. So when tackling the portable toilet issue, he used this "deep dive" research to determine whether there were any similar inventions in the works.

"You don't want to spend time on a product if someone already has a solution," Nelson said. "... I kept seeing that nobody had solved the problem, and furthermore, nobody was looking."

He discovered that portable toilets originated in World War II shipyards, and while the technology now includes plastic, not much else has improved. 

His four main goals, he said, were to make the TidyHut odorless, waterless, environmentally friendly, and clean and sterile for each user, each and every time the toilet is used. To meet these goals, however, took a lot of problem solving. For example, how to ensure it is clean and sterile for each user? Each time the door opens, the toilet "flushes" and the plastic seat is reset with clean and sterile plastic each time.

"When you sit on this thing, your butt is the first one to sit on it each and every time," Nelson said.

What if someone does not lock the door and it is opened while in use? Nelson added a safety feature that it will not reset when occupied. Another problem he had to account for is the plastic bottles and other garbage that would ultimately end up in the toilet, he said. The idea for the flower-shaped mechanism that pulls items down came from watching television with his daughter, Nelson said. When he saw the "hippi" flower shape on the side of the Mystery Machine on "Scooby Doo," he knew what to do. The mechanism is made out of soft enough rubber that it grabs and pulls items down to keep the toilet from clogging and backing up.

His mission of no longer have to drive his wife to town is well underway as Nelson has succeeded in designing a prototype that surpasses his four requirements. The TidyHut is also collapsible for easy transportation and is able to record and transmit digital business analytics for time of day usage and GPS locations. Furthermore, the byproducts of the TidyHut can be legally thrown in a dumpster or buried in the ground to become farm rich fertilizer within 90 days, Nelson said.

His target customer base for the TidyHut includes the military, the construction industry, festivals and events, and natural disaster relief.

"It's about a $1.5 to $2.5 billion industry alone that we are looking to be able to change everybody's expectations of portable toilets," Nelson said.

Nelson will be discussing the TidyHut inventing process in detail during the March Inventors Association of Idaho meeting.

The IAOI meeting is at 2 p.m. Wednesday, March 7, in the second floor auditorium of the Columbia Bank Building, 414 Church St.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.