More electric composter babble

I like my little electric composter machine. It doesn’t really compost; it dehydrates and grinds up the material put in.

I like that it gets the waste hot so I don’t have to deal with a bunch of mold and bacteria and whatever else might develop if you leave a bunch of loose compostable material around.

The electric composter I’ve got is an off-brand model. Like, it doesn’t have a name printed on the front of it–so I’m not affiliating myself with a company that could be terrible to their employees. But really it’s because I couldn’t afford to buy an expensive high-quality branded machine, and couldn’t rationalize my way into getting one that costs above a certain amount of money.

I was obsessing about electric composters for like a year before a sale dropped the price low enough that I was willing to get one.

And I love it.

It uses electricity, but it’s only a few cents per day. And if I had a solar panel setup or a little windmill, I could be able to run it "for free."

Yes, every appliance takes material to make. Running the machine releases "X amount of" exhaust.

So I realize that no appliance is ever "free" of costs and consequence.

But for what it is, I think it’s a net positive for me.

I have like OCD tendencies. I cannot maintain a conventional composting situation. Whether a big outdoor pile; the spinny bin; or even a series of holes dug out in a garden plot (You dump your daily kitchen scraps into a hole, layer it with dirt, and continue that over days until the hole is filled in to the point where animals won’t dig it up, then the rest of the hole is filled in with dirt. Then you move to the next hole and start again. Then you can use that plot for gardening a season or two later.). I can’t do it.

I have tried. It has been disastrous and horrifying. I can’t do it.

So the electric composter machine is the answer for me.

I can put in eggshells, kitchen scraps of vegetables and bits of fat, leftovers scraped off a plate, softened chicken bones, dead houseplants, coffee grounds. I just have to maintain a balance of ingredients.

Like, cooked food contains salts. So I can add a little bit of leftovers off someone’s plate, but I can’t add too much if I’m planning to use the results as compost. But honestly, I don’t put much leftovers in my machine. My mix is largely like cabbage leaves, coffee grounds, banana peels, and things like that.

We’ve been collecting then dumping my machine results in holes around the yard that we then fill in with dirt and let season. Just make sure it’s not too close to a tree or a bush you want to keep alive, because as the compost matures it does become a very strong fertilizer.

So most of my mixes are actually being composted and used to "feed" the land. But there’s been a few mixes that I made then threw into the kitchen trash bag. And that was because the mix was too wet when I added it into my storage container.

You want to let your mix cool down before you add it to your storage container. And you definitely want to make sure it’s a dry mix.

Otherwise just take that moist mix and put it right in a hole in the ground or to feed your worm farm. Any moisture in your storage container results in a gross situation you don’t want.

Like, the machine heats your mix to a high enough temperature to kill e.Coli and salmonella and a bunch of other baddies. And if you run your machine long enough, the result will be lightweight dry "soil"–but it’s dehydrated ground up food particulates.

A bit of moisture and you get gray fluffy mold. Yikes.

But as dehydrated food bits… An electric composter machine can help you create awesome mixes you can use for different stuff.

Like, you can sanitize the mixer bucket then use your machine to make food for your worm farm, for your pond fish, or to make a nice fertilizer spread to sprinkle over your newly sown ground cover. It’s basically a big spice grinder that dehydrates and chops up your kitchen scraps.

You can run a mix until it comes out like that lightweight soil they use on store plants where you can basically shake it off when it’s dry and it falls like brown fluff, or you can make a mix that’s like a crumbly cookie dough. There’s versatility there!

And my machine has two filters that I fill with loose activated charcoal pellets. And the whole purpose is to not have the machine blast a bunch of stink into the house. That’s it. That’s the whole purpose of the activated charcoal.

And I’ve been wondering if I can rinse the used charcoal then spread it out on a tarp to dry in the sun and then use it again.

I don’t think any gross stuff gets in the charcoal. Hot air runs through it, but it doesn’t come into direct contact with the compost itself. But still, I would probably have the used rinse water go into the sewer rather than directly into the yard.

Is there a way to sanitize activated charcoal pellets? I know some people wash then bake them.

The machine directions say I can drip some essential oil over top of the activated charcoal before running the machine, and the smell will be better. But I can’t try that because I have a cat. So I have no firsthand knowledge on whether adding essential oils results in a pleasant diffuser situation or a horrifying floral-scented hot garbage situation.

I like my machine. I just had to forget about the advertising around electric composter machines where the lady runs her machine, then shovels out the mix and immediately adds it to her potted plant.

Like, "You just killed your peace lily."

It’s better to think of the mix as being dehydrated food. If it gets wet, it becomes food again, and thus can rot and smell and create a big unwanted mess.

BUT if it’s mixed in a compost pile or mixed with a bunch of dirt and buried for a couple months, it becomes great plant food. Fertilizer. Conventional compost created in a roundabout fashion.

And knowing that it’s just dehydrated food, it has to be understood that throwing it away in the garbage means that it goes to the landfill. And its just been dried out… when it starts breaking down it releases the same amount of methane as it would if it hadn’t been dehydrated and chopped up.

It’s a minimized form of the same amount of garbage that it started out as. The greenhouse emissions it produces does not change.

So compost the "compost" you get out of your electric composter machine, and that would be the best thing to do with your mix.

Plus you can know what you’re putting in your garden or fertilizing your fruit trees with. I mean, I’ve bought those big bags of fruit and vegetable mix soil–from a NAME BRAND!–and there were chunks of green plastic in it. Like, they must have been chopping their mix up and someone dropped a green plastic piece in there on accident or something, but it was pieces of plastic being introduced into my garden.

I did not like that, Sam I am.

And just for a thought experiment:

I think it would be cool to have an apartment building or something where there’s a shared electric composter machine, but it’s a big industrial size one at like the center of the building. And people drop their stuff down into it, but the hole isn’t big enough for someone to fall in. And then the filter/exhaust port releases into a vent that has fans in it, and the exhaust causes the fans to spin, and that energy is collected to run air conditioning that blows through the whole building.

People can close the vent if it’s too cold for them, and their individual apartments have their own heating systems they can control. And during the summertime, people don’t die from the heat.

And in wintertime, the energy from the fans can be collected and used by the residents of the building. Like, they’re going to be running more heat because it’s cold. They’re going to be running their lights longer because it’s darker earlier. Maybe there’s a gym in the building or a laundry room or a shared indoor garden–all things that require electricity.

Like, you could have a building that has solar panels, and that electricity is used to run the shared electric composter machine, and the exhaust of the electric composter machine is used to spin the air conditioning fans.

I’m not a scientist or an inventor. I’m a consumer that can think about and wish for things I would like to use as a consumer. Things that the "techbros" are not funding because they’re no longer people that produce technology, they just wear nerd-clothes and accumulate wealth so they can show off to their bullies (the people that refused to put up with their narcissistic nonsense) and punish the people that didn’t want to have sex with them.

We need more inventors making inventions that people want to use, and less guys that just want to get rich quick by victimizing the public.

Please.

~Harper Kingsley

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