picture - Hot box with lid and front removed showing finished compost
This is my invention developed with Green Machine Solutions at the Worm Research Centre. It was developed because I couldn’t find a large enough secure composter with a good base and lid, which would hold a sufficient mass of material to keep warm even through the winter. If you are composting food waste it is important to keep the system active for 12 months of the year. The Hot Box is being used mainly by schools, businesses and institutions, usually as a maturation container for one of the in vessel systems.
The Hot Box is generally used
for maturation following an in vessel stage . Larger woodchips can be sieved out (from a tumbling or other
in-vessel system using large wood chips) to
go back to the first stage composter and
the material is then perfect for the worms, for in effect it becomes a
wormery. Worms naturally invade
compost heaps at the maturation phase and they love the large surface area the
Hot Box provides and the gentle warmth even through the coldest times of the
year.
Ideally, two or more boxes
are used, depending on the volume of materials needing to be processed. When
one is full the other one is filling and then the first one can be emptied. The
front has removable slats, which makes emptying easy.
One prison using a Big Hanna had several Scotty’s Hot Boxes as that enabled them to process more food waste than their size of Big Hanna was designed to throughput. That in turn saved them having to purchase a bigger more expensive machine.
Cost of Scotty’s Hot box
£445 plus VAT
Pros of Scotty’s Hot box
- Large size coupled with hollow board construction
means it retains heat well
- Worms love it – makes an excellent wormery and the
worms cannot drown in it
- Works well as a maturation box for many schools,
businesses and institutions and with any of the above in-vessel systems
- Can be used as a general purpose composter for any
compostable material
- You can collect the leachate from it
- If set up on a solid base then rats find it
extremely hard to break in although I still prefer to use it as a
maturation bin for cooked food waste.
Cons
of Scotty’s Hot box
- Price (bespoke handmade product)
- Size
- Needs a fairly flat, level site
