Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: drum composter experience?

[Kay Argyle (argyle]

CompostTwin sounds like the same brand we have.  It stands behind our common
house.  Scraps from common house meals and from some residents' kitchens go
into it.

In our experience, it composts faster than a bin composter, although
certainly not as fast as their ads claim.  Do watch the video before
assembling it! -- in fact, watch an assembly step, do it, watch the next
step, do it.  Because we had a macho "I don't need directions" type helping,
we had to take ours back apart and start over.

Some management things we have learned:  Whatever is under the frame (dirt,
cement blocks ...) has to be absolutely level, or the frame twists,
especially when the drum is full, and the cogs skip.

Somebody has to take the responsibility of turning it the recommended five
times a day, or it gets smelly.  After we put a pile of woodchips, and later
a garbage can full of half-composted sawdust, next to it for people to toss
some in when they put in kitchen scraps, the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio
improved, which also helped control smells and flies.

I made a wooden sign with the words "Load This Side" and hung it on rings
from the front bar, so it can be slid back and forth, alternating sides.
That helped reduce the amount of fresh material being put into the side we
were trying to finish.

Some small wheelbarrows will fit under it for unloading the compost, but our
heavy-duty contractor wheelbarrow is considerably too tall.

Drawbacks:  Ours has gotten off its rollers repeatedly.  After a while this
stripped out the cogs on the stand rollers.  A member got new ones, but
possibly didn't install them correctly -- the rollers are too close
together, and the drum doesn't fit.  None of the gardener/handyman types has
had the time-energy-inclination to dissassemble the thing and fix the
problem, so it's been like that since last summer (? at least).

The buckles fastening the doors at the bottom are reasonably good quality,
but (unless the company has changed the design since we bought ours) _do_
install hinges at the top of the doors.  The doors on ours have two tabs of
bent metal that fit into slots in the drum.  Since most users just flip the
doors back when putting material in, instead of removing them, after a while
the tabs break off

Kay
Wasatch Commons
Salt Lake City, Utah
argyle at  mines.utah.edu
*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."
-- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

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