Wheelie bin to composter....

Is this your own bin? Council are at pains to me to say the bin, despite me paying 75 quid to empty it a year, is not my property, and no modification that affects the use of the bin is to be attempted.

Brian

The shovel hole, even if llosely covered, will give some ventilation and drainage.. I doubt if you need a hole in the bottom provided you put in a shovel-full of soil with its flora and fauna every week or so. If it all turns into anaerobic stinking slush in a few months you can blame me.

AFAIK my wheelie bins are mine, and I just pay the council to empty them. BICBW.

As for using one as a composter, composters such as daleks work best if they are open at the bottom and standing on soil, so that worms can get up inside and assist the composting. But if you're leaving the wheels on your bin, the base is never going to be in close contact with anything underneath, so I'd just drill a few 1cm holes in the bottom to let any juice drain out, and perhaps a little air in, otherwise it'll get wet and stinky inside.

Our council is always bleating about not enough money but when we reduced from a separate wheelie for cardboard and plastics to a single one for both the resulting spare bin was left for householders to use or dispose off. Quite a few of them have ended up on the back of builders wagons as a handy mini skip. I still have mine kept a few things in it but it was a PITA to get things out from the bottom so it stands mainly empty, yet I am loathe to get rid of it on the principle you always find a use for something you threw away the day after.

Richard

I think most bins already have a small hole in the bottom for drainage.

Any bigger holes may provide ingress for small creatures.

Owain

That is because theya hve to fit onto specially designed lorries to empty them. Modify one ansd it might jam the works

Mine has, mouled in "Property of Guildford Borough Council"

Passing observation - if you put avocado skins in the compost rats will consider it worth their while to tunnel in. (The same would of course apply to grain or flour.)

Other than that, most such creatures will make a positive contribution to the composting process.

My garden waste bin has the Cornwall Council logo printed on it, not moulded in, but it doesn't claim ownership and could probably be erased, and the ordinary household waste bin I bought myself from an independent supplier.

Wheelie bin probably not really big enough.

You could then sink the base say 6 inches in to the soil so that they both make contact.

Depends what you want to compost and how much of it there is.

I use my own green bin to make leaf mould and would be very hacked off if they emptied it. 5x 10mm holes in the bottom is enough for that. I decant the resulting stuff into a normal black bin for the second year.

I expect you need a fair bit more ventilation for general composting but my setup is old pallets and old doors as containment and never adding less than 1m^3 of anything. At that scale it gets mad hot in two or three days and once or twice I have had it smouldering internally.

I'd put a few 10mm holes in the base and give it a try. You need to make sure it doesn't end up as anaerobic green-black stinking slime.

That is not the usual interpretation of the rules.

That doesn't sound like any that I have used. When you park it, the base sits flat on the ground. The wheels touch, but only lift the base when you tilt it.

There are drawings at the bottom of this page:

Chris

Leaves are best packed into plastic bags and chucked under the hedge for a couple of years. They take along time to rot down.

I've inherited 3 bins, I called the council and asked if I could repurpose them, They said no. I asked if I could dispose of them, They said no, they would have to pick them up.

What happened next was a classic farce in which a case was opened, much correspondence, visits were promised, none were forthcoming. Then I got a message to say the case was closed. I still have the bins.

A Hampshire garden center/ tools place near here that sells end of line stuff was selling new wheelie bins a few years back, they had the name of someplace up North on them. I assumed whatever town city it was had changed from plain black ones to other colours and got rid of their old but unused ones.

GH

The one that my brothers neighbour insisted on blocking my brothers parking area with didn?t, after moving it 200 hundred miles so he couldn?t do it again I put a water butt tap on it so the missus could use it to make liquid fertiliser out of cumfry and nettle leaves or whatever else she put in what I called a witches brew. Boy did the result stink.

GH

Not a bad idea to stand such a Dalek on some strong small apertured steel mesh though so worms can get through but rats are discouraged from burrowing in, even if no kitchen waste is put in they are attracted by the worms as food and the warmth makes them attractive nest sites for them to breed in.

GH