I was going to post this on the previous thread but thought I would start fresh
I bought the very first OMI compost tumbler to be sold retail.
That was back in the days when all gardening was done by large brested women wearing a skimpy bikiini & wearing high heels .
We had to order it through Grace Brothers Broadway and take it home on the train ( not easy ) as we had no vehicles ( I am the only person in the family to ever drive ) .
That tumbler process thousands of loads of compost at my parents place then a decade latter I took it to Refern , then back to mums after the big prang then back again for the 5 years we lived at Habberfield , got striped internally and painted in POR 15 the used at Springwood for 6 years & finally taken to Lindfield when she tossed me out .
It fell off the back of the truck when I moved to Carlingford after being at Lindfield for a decade which finally killed it but by that time I already had 17 afore mentioned bins so it got used mainly for drying out grass to keep the wet dry ratio correct .
But by the time I retired it I could make a full load of mulch grade compost in 10 days.
Once you got to the cold stage it was a waste of tiem being in the tumbler & final decomposition is best done in a bin, Two to 4 weeks to earth grade compost in summer .
Swarfy
Your elegant solution is an under sink worm farm commonly used in Asia & the Middle East
They work really well, better still if you run the scraps through a food processor to finely chop it but not liquify it .
BagONails.
I got black snakes, brown snakes, green snakes, tree snakes & even the odd goanna .
So a big open bin is nout of the question as like you mentioned it becomes rat centeral
Add to that they grow hay on the 500acres opposite so when they are cutting, bailing the road turns grey with all of the escaping mice.
For composting I use the council buns
The trick is to load them but leave one empty
The toss the contents to the left or right depending where the empty bin is.
Takes 2 to 5 minutes with a nice big hay fork and I can get it to the mulch state in about 9 days in summer
Because each bin is tossed into the one next door every day it does not become rat / mouse Hilton
Right now I am getting ready to do a load of fire weed & dry grass with a bag of fresh chook poo & some worm wee if it gets too dry.
As with the under sink worm farmes, the trick to rapid decomposition is partical size & for that I have an anchient B & D shredder .
I had used it for so long that the first one melted the plastic housing on the motor.
Remember the bacteria can only attack the organic material from the cut edges so the more the edges the more colonies of bacteria working for free. If I have the time when they are first filled they get tossed 2 or 3 times a day because like Covid Virus packets, bacteria do not sleep they just eat *** fart & reproduce .
Most of the loads are just wet ( fresh cut ) and dry grass with some sort of manure depending upon the end use .
When we prune the olives or I prune anything I drag one of the shredders out and as you cut a branch you toss it in the shredder which saves a lot of time & space . Decades go I used to cut them, pile them up cart them then spend 2 weeks processing the clippings .
Now I just spread a tarp and collect it when done .
People read the instructions and get overwhelmed with the alphabet soup when all the bacteria want is food, air, water & shelter .
In nature no one worries about P:K:N ratios and unless you are trying to win the compost gold medal at the local agricultura show neither should you but some fresh manure will really push things along. Worm wee is good for dampening if the mix gets dry but people wee is just as good ( don't get caught ) if not better .
The bins they were giving away were the RELN corrigated bins with a hinged lit
First thing I found was they needed to be bolted together , the plastic ties just don't work for anything other than the lid
Like all composting systems the instructions are a joke and tossing from one bin to the nest will have the hot cycle finished in 5 to 10 days by which time they volume will be about 20% of the starting volume so as the volume reduces , you compound the bins till you are down to one or two so if you have a 1/2 dozen RELN bins you can be loading them every week.
After that no vermin will be interested in the contents so they go into a bin like this one
https://www.mydeal.com.au/290l-compost-bin-food-waste-recycling-composter-kitchen-garden-composting-green-2212416 for cold composting which can be accelerated by adding cockroaches or worms this will take anything from 1 month to a full year to produce the black earth like compost .
Eight of the RELN bins will decompse to one RELN bin by the time hot composting has finished thus you never end up with a mountain of waste waiting to be processed .
I grow al my veggies in nothing but compost sitting on the ground or a mix of 2 parts compost to 1 part charcoal for the wicking pots .
To each goes the fertalizer for whatever I am going to grow
Col
If you have not gone to sleep yet. Decades of using the OMI bin had me making some modifiactions
1) the nuts & Bolts onthe drains replaced with stainless coach bolts because the threads wre always corroding on the originals and geting a spoannar in to the head was impossible
2) a lot coarser mesh used on the drain because the original stuff was forever clogging
3) Diagonal straps from the internal paddles top to bottom to break up the material left right & prevent it forming logs when tumbleing
5) Solar cell and small electric motor so the bin turns itself during daylight hours of full sun ( very proud of that one ).
Again the instructions were written by some one who had never actually made compost & as with the RELN ones fixated with alphabet soup .
The only thing to worry about was wet & dry
For the OMI bin I used a pump up sprayer to damp it down the instant I started seeing the white bacteria and sawdust . chain saw shavings or ash from the wood heater for drying the mix out.
The big downside is of course you can only do one batch at a time and again once the mix goes cold, no purpose in keeping it in there
