I was gifted a Lomi Home Composter and this post contains affiliate links and as always the viewpoints in this post are my own. I also have a coupon code for a free skylight with purchase. Add Lomi and a Skylight to your cart. Apply code: emeraldcitylife at checkout.
We are trying out the Lomi Home Composter because I have one teenage son who is very curious about gardening so this is a project we are doing together. In Seattle, we already separate food waste and compostables from our recycling and other garbage and it is picked up weekly at our house. We are very interested in the “Grow Mode setting,” with the Lomi Home Composter because it is the setting that works for creating soil for our garden from the food waste we are already putting on our curb. (The pamphlet says the soil we create using the “Grow Mode Setting” can be mixed as a 1:10 ratio with garden soil)
Taking the Lomi out of the box and getting it ready for first use
I am horrible at following instructions so my 14 year old son was tasked with most of this project. The Lomi was packaged in an interesting cardboard shape and the box was a little bigger than I thought it would be. Once unboxed, the Lomi home Composter dimensions are: 16″ W x 13″ D x 12”
And there are a few steps you need to do before you start your Lomi
All of the instructions are in a little pamphlet that comes with the Lomi composter and my son and I both read it (one of us might have skimmed it). We had to open filters and fill them with charcoal. And then we had to choose the setting we wanted to run the Lomi on-the one that makes soil is the longest and takes around 18-20 hours. It is called “Grow Mode Setting”
We weren’t sure what kinds of things to start our first compost with. We had a bunch of old stale bread and avocado peel that went into it as well as onion peelings and acorn squash. We read through the list of things that shouldn’t really go in it and decided that maybe the avocado pit shouldn’t go in.
We filled the Lomi composter up to the fill line (about 3/4 full). It was a little noisier than we thought (not obtrusive noise but it might be better suited to our garage than our kitchen if we run it overnight often. (we also forgot to take off the sticker that told us to take off the sticker before we ran the machine. We have taken that off now.) The machine ran for about 20 hours than beeped and shut off.
We were really surprised at how much the food waste shrunk down.
It is going to take a lot of cycles to make even the 1:10 ratio for our garden and it’s winter time so it’s hard to know how effective this soil will be. I still put it into our garden outside and this is what we’ll do as we make more soil from our food waste with our Lomi Composter. And both my son and I were pretty enthusiastic about doing this again-we both thought this experience is pretty intriguing but we’ll be trying this again after this busy last-week-of-school-before the holidays. (And I really wish my Lomi had the see-through lid)
Have you ever used a home composter? (Please let me know if you have a Lomi composter too! I’d love to hear how it’s working for you. )
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)
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