It's not a bad system, if you can get enough air into the process, and keep the gnats out of it (or at least keep them in, since there will always be some that get in.) I did not start with a close enough hole pattern, so eight buckets in, I've had to go back to drill 4-5 of them more thoroughly, which is maddening if your original pattern was haphazard, you don't want to break the space between the holes, the drill bit walks, needs to be sharp / deburr. Maybe if you could get a robot to do it
There are some advantages vs small bucket with a sack stuffed in it, taking that out to the composter and trying to dig a hole where the last batch wasn't buried, so you could cover it up and not have a ton of flies in there. Then the bottom of that bucket would get smelly and need to be cleaned out, because it couldn't breathe. And the ants would get into it. My kitchen setup now is a flowerpot of dirt & mulch on a saucer on a dish of borax, so ants are solved. But it needed a gnat screen.
This is a family of four, so there are of course entire apples, bags of expired nuts, corn chips, and whatever other nutso amount of one thing gone bad getting thrown into the compost at once. All of the worm composting advice is always to not overload the system with like four whole bad apples and six onion peels, but it's handling that as well or better than what was happening in the Earth Machine (a short wide conical plastic composter, which was just full of worms and never got very hot.)
I've got 8 buckets with 900 holes drilled in the bottom stacked 2,2, & 3 where the newest bucket goes into the middle of the stack, oldest ones are on the bottom layer, top layer goes to the top of the freshest sandwich before starting on the bottom layer. Spacers supporting the 2nd layer of buckets, cotton t-shirt material wrapped around the gaps to keep the gnats from propagating, also on the tops. Oldest one comes out, 3rd one to the bottom, new on that, oldest other top becomes 3rd.
But what's in the oldest bucket? I generally rake the top few inches of worms into the newest bucket to cover the top of the fresh food scraps, plus some ground eggshells (worm teeth) and then I have to dump the rest somewhere, which is like 70% worm castings, avocado skins + pits, woody stuff, and still a lot of worms. How do you get the castings without the worms and cocoons? 🤷 Worms love to live in their poop, they never want to leave it. I end up dumping them in the garden together.
@Andres4NY what goes under the bottom bucket though? I'm at rolling plant trays, but would rather move it outside, on some kind of bed of mulch, though maybe the bottom buckets need to be suspended to maintain the air circulation.
So the 8th bucket that I just dumped out, from 2 months ago, still had a mango pit in it, most of the rest was unrecognizable, but the worms had not vacated that section yet. Thus I've tried dumping this into an Urban Worm Bag, but probably need to be doing some horizontal migration scheme, maybe with the stacks of buckets migrating in the same direction. How to cycle this in a finite space though, close to the house where it won't freeze in winter or cook in summer?
And without it turning into a fly factory, if you have a lot of exposed compost without enough mulch on top or some kind of screen cover. Did I mention the rock tumbler that crushes the eggshells? That eggshell powder also might help keep the flies down, and probably makes more nutrients available to the plants. With the old compost setup, large chunks of eggshell would still be in there, even after a few years and cycling through two composters.
The dream was to have this be a quick process so you aren't tempted to procrastinate rotating the compost out of the kitchen before it starts to smell. The reality is I never do it before 7 days and the 5gal bucket is totally full, and it takes 30-45min each time, with some combination of fiddling with gnat gaskets around the gaps, cleaning up spilled or dropped worms/castings, and dealing with not having a good spot to dump the oldest bucket of compost that still has a lot of worms in it.
My #city put in flashing lights at a crosswalk on a major road, but they placed the beg buttons a couple of feet away from the crosswalk. It's just far enough away that on a #bike you have to go past it and turn around in order to hit the button before crossing, which is really frustrating for me.
It makes me think that no one actually considered how it would be used in practice before they built it, or they thought it would be fine for most people.
@TransportationHistorian if the goal was to make it convenient for people on bikes, drivers might actually decide to take a bike instead, and the infrastructure would look very different, high speed cars mixing with bikes at surface crossings wouldn't be politically tolerated, and definitely wouldn't need flashing lights. The goal of the crossing designs in the US, is to keep you safe by keeping you out of the way of cars until they can come to a stop from 60mph, & then wait 3s more for safety.
@mckern@whack a wider kerf and larger teeth might clear the cut better if you're doing enough ripping to bother swapping vs what else you use it for that needs tighter curves in harder wood. IDK if you need to re-set the teeth on a bandsaw blade or if you would want to, but it's common with hand saws.
I'm thinking air-to-air heat pumps are not actually a great answer to the heating problem. Blowing around warm air isn't terribly comfortable to start with, and even if you have an inverter, you can't lower the outlet temperature so much or it feels chilly, so it has to run hotter in cycles, which means short-cycling, which means not running when you have free power from solar & also needing higher currents (for the hotter cycles) while running when you don't have solar, and the source is cold
750Wh / 24hrs, so it ran for three hours total at 250W, while overshooting the set point by 3-5°F. On nights where it was too cold to function, the day was above 40 and there were times when it wasn't running, a thermal battery that could hold 2-3x the available solar for that day might be possible with a water heating coil+tank.