You may not think it's that important, and I guess it's not, until you run out…

Originally, and for years of hiking, we used the single sheet toilet paper on our hikes. Obviously, we didn't use it at home: I mean, I always thought that was one of the joys of hiking?

Anyway, Sandi is now insistent that we use Quilton 3 Ply on our hikes. Problem was, that there was not an accurate method of calculating the amount used of 3-Ply when all you knew was 1-Ply; and using number of sheets used/person/day grossly over-inflated the expected 3-Ply rate.

Calculation of 3-Ply base on number of sheets used.

Type	Weight	Net	Sheets	gm/sheet	gm/day
1k Sheet Roll	188.48	183.41	1,000	0.183	7.24
Quilton 3Ply	112.69	107.62	180	0.598	24.05

I can't remember which hike I used, but it was a short 3-4 day walk, where we weighed lots of our re-supply essentials in and out at the end of the walk: Toilet Paper, Sunscreen, Insect Repellant, etc.

So, the only answer was measuring our usage at home, which is not perfect, but it's at least better. Toileting whilst hiking, like everything else, is different, more regular, and, well, different. I like to think of a hike as monastic, where you do the same thing, at the same time, every day. One's toilet seems to be the same…

So our first measurement at home indicated a 55% reduction in the number of sheets used and 48% increase in the gm/person/day used compared to our 1-Ply rates.

Type	Weight	Net	Sheets	gm/sheet	gm/day
Quilton 3Ply	112.69	107.62	180	0.598	10.70

That's a good start, and has been updated into version 6 of the Itinerary, but I think our next hike we'll weigh the roll in and out, as I'm sure it's going to be different to home usage (see Six Foot Track - Toilet Paper Testing for the testing update).