We purchased and installed our Lavac head in July 2004 to replace our Raritan PHII. The Raritan that was in the boat was a good working head, but it needed constant attention to keep working properly or to keep from leaking. The Lavac head is highly recommended from those cruisers that have them and are considered to be the most maintenance and trouble free heads. They are very common in Europe but the only distributer here in the US is Defender Industries. These heads, by the way, are not new to the market. They’ve been around since the 1960s.

The Lavac Popular head is a very simple to install and use. The head consists of the toilet bowl and a Henderson pump, we chose the manual pump instead of the electric pump. The toilet lid and seat have a gasket on the underside of each piece so when the seat and lid are closed and the pump pumped, the contents of the bowl are sucked out and a vacuum is created causing clean water to be drawn into the bowl. The only drawback of this head is that one has to wait for the vacuum to equalize before the lid can be opened again for use, this has not been an issue for us but something to consider. Typically it takes only a couple of minutes to be able to open the lid again. The only moving part of the entire system is the Henderson pump (basically a manual bilge pump). There are only two hose connections to the bowl, a 5/8” water intake and a 1.5” discharge connection. These are standard hose sizes found on most other heads.

The actual operation is very easy and simple and uses about the same amount of water as the Raritan did. The bowl is porcelan but the seat and lid is plastic. There are a variety of options for installation and the manual contains excellent diagrams of the options available. We’ve been using the Lavac daily and have not yet had any issues, unlike the Raritan we had before. Because the Henderson pump is basically a manual bilge pump a Y-valve can be installed before the pump with the second entry point being used either as a back up bilge pump or it can be connected to the holding tank so the same pump that empties the head can be used to empty the holding tank.

Rating:

Performance                  10
Quality                              10
Ease of Use                    10
Installation                         9
Documentation                  9
Customer Service         n/a

Overall Rating                 9.55
Would buy again            Yes
 

Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006 S/V Bruadair. No reproduction without written consent.