A Pleasant Porta-Potty
At Jupe we were supplying the glamping industry with drop in place bedrooms and noticed that bathrooms were a big challenge for the industry. The two big goals were to make the toilet fixture as different as possible from what people expect from a porta-potty, and to make it as easy as possible to install. Adding features to make it attractive, while controlling costs required innovation and diligence. Keeping down the prefabrication and installation costs required throwing out traditional building techniques. Sites either had to build complex bathrooms on site, or use unpleasant porta-potties. We wanted to provide a middle ground with the same customer experience as a built-in place-bathroom, but with the ease of a drop-in-place porta-potty.
Rather than traditional framed construction that treats each wall as a separate structural component that can be self supporting; I came up with a system where we tied the walls, floor and ceiling together in a way that allowed us to treat the complete structure as a single unit. By doing that, perpendicular walls were able to buttress each other while the connections to the floor and ceiling provided further resistance to bending. This is somewhat analogous to how the walls of a soda can can be as thin as a piece of paper but still support a person standing on even a depressurized can. This change allowed a 20% weight reduction in the bathroom walls and an 80% reduction in the number of parts (not including fasteners). Preorders of the Portal bathroom created a lot of interested and was featured in several publications.
