My tumbling composter doesn’t work in the winter. Which is ironic, given that it was made in Canada. But it’s a common problem. Winter composting is a problem for anyone who tries to compost small amounts of material outdoors, in a cold climate. Composting stops as the temperatures drop.
So I made a little insulated shed, to fit around the composter.
The upshot is that, so far, it seems to keep the compost around 16F warmer than it would otherwise be, without the shed. On average.
I’m not sure that’s going to do the job.
This seemed like a good way to put some Coroplast political yard signs to good use, rather than tossing them into the trash. At the last minute I decided to make this into a solar shed, substituting a piece of double-pane glass for the front of the shed, and using a scrap of 1.5″ foam board for the top.
But does it work? It looks like it should. The Coroplast-and-wood walls ought to have an insulation value somewhere around R-5, the top should be about an R-8, and the entire front of the shed is south-facing glass. It looks like a big solar oven.
The only real test is whether or not it continues to compost kitchen scraps in the cold. So I won’t really know if it works for another month or so. At which point, either the composter will be full of un-decomposed kitchen scraps, or it will be full of usable compost.
In the meantime, I can measure what it does to the temperature of the air around the composter. Last night, I placed a pair of temperature data loggers to measure the temperature difference between the inside and the outside of the shed. Both loggers were out of direct sunlight. One was placed on the back side of the compost tumbler. One was placed on a trash can sitting behind the composter
And the result is that the inside of the shed stays about 16F warmer than the outside, on average.
