(Article in English, if you want to see all the marine sanitation guides in Spanish, CLICK HERE). There's no point kicking up a stink and getting a pain in your head when trying to select the right marine macerator toilet for you and your boat. To ensure you're not left with issues at sea, just take these simple steps in making your decision.

Choose a toilet to home don't worry us, because the plumbing and drainage is already there (well, it should be), we think it's easy. Althought marine sanitation manufacturers continue to develop products that offer home-away-from-home comfort, differences remain.

1. COMPOSITION:

A whole sanitation system consists of: toilet, holding tank, deck discharge fitting and an overboard discharge pump for emptying in unrestricted waters. For this reason, it's important to ensure the toilet you select, has a metal macerator blade that will chop up the waste, sufficiently, so that it can pass through the entire system.

2. WATER:

The water consumption of your toilet should be a key consideration and what you choose will depend on the holding tank capacity. More water usage and higher power draw does not necessarily mean that the waste is being macerated more successfully and that the toilet is left cleaner. If a toilet uses 3 to 4 liters per flush, four adults could fill up a holding tank with a capacity of 75 liters or less in just a day. This may be acceptable if you spend most of your time at sea in unrestricted waters or you have a huge tank onboard and capacity is not an issue, otherwise it will become very inconvenient very quickly.

3. ENERGY:

Look for an electric toilet with low power consumption. Check to see what the manufacturers recommend for a fuse or circuit breaker size. The toilets that we have evaluated range from 20 amps to 40 amps in breaker size. That is a considerable difference that will run down batteries quickly and will require much larger wire size for connection to the power source.

4. NOISE:

You want to know that your marine toilet is in good working order, but the last thing you want is to know when a fellow passenger goes in the middle of the night. The truth is that no toilet is completely silent but quiet systems are available. Noise or sound pressure is measured in decibels in the A scale (dBA), which closely matches the human ear response to sound. So be sure to look for the dBA figures when selecting your macerating toilet.

Next week, we'll have more tips for you, making you an expert in selecting the perfect macerator toilet system to suit your needs.