Hi, thank you for this great website and forum. This project is exciting for me. I've kept redworms for many years, and would love to get them to compost everything from the house!
I'm in a very flat area, with one story buildings, and I'll have trouble raising a bathroom higher than an IBC tote. But I can reasonably enter the tote through the side wall two-thirds or three-quarters from the bottom. Would this be high enough? What depth is your bedding in the tote?
I'm in Florida, and it rarely gets cold here. I'm not concerned about keeping them warm, only keeping them cool. I'd have the same surface area, just not a super-thick bedding. The pipe hole would have to be cut and sealed, and the exit from the pipe wouldn't be as nice as entering from the top.
What do you think?
Flat ground is a problem for a gravity fed system! You need to feed the waste into the centre of the worm tank. This is essential, so you'd need to take your waste pipe through the side wall and ensure the waste is deposited in the centre of the tank. If you bring the waste in at one side and deposit it there, not only will you get waste piling up one side of the tank, effectively reducing the surface area, but the liquids will run straight down the side wall of the tank, largely escaping treatment because they're not passing through the organic matter and its ecosystem.
The tank is normally filled two thirds to three quarters full of organic material (see the Design and Construction and Function and Maintenance pages). The thicker the depth of organic matter in the tote, the more efficiently it operates, so you want to maximise your depth of material as far as possible. The system will still operate on about a foot of material, but you're pushing it and giving yourself no margin of error. Bear in mind that the ecosystem consumes the organic carbon in the process of cleaning the waste and that you need to supply more from time to time, so your depth of material will continually be decreasing.
Are you proposing to site the tank at ground level? You can get away with burying it to a depth of one and a half feet if you have good depth (at least one and half feet) of topsoil. So if you can dig your greenfilter bed 2-3 feet deep and get lots of organic material in there, then you can run a pipe at that depth from the partially-buried IBC tote.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the info! The tank will be situated next to the bathroom building wall, so we only have 5 or 6 feet of pipe to run. Hopefully a drop of just a few inches will work. The standards say that that's okay.
Yes, I wanted to get the tank at ground level. I am heeding your warning that you need to get to the output from time to time, in case of clogs. But I can dig it down some, for sure. Tampa is a sandbar, so we don't have any topsoil to speak of, just sand. There are plenty of live oaks around the proposed greenfilter area. I can definitely dig very far down for the greenfilter bed, and I'll have no problem filling it with mulch and leaves.
I'm excited to try this at my somewhat remote farm, and see how it works. I'll be starting a much more public farm downtown soon, and I'd love to include a vermicompost toilet there for education/practicality of not using city sewer or septic tanks. But, practice at the hidden place first, smiley-face.
Thanks for spending the time documenting this worthwhile project, it's very well done. And thanks for answering questions!
Cool! Please let us know how it goes and consider sending in details of your project for the projects section! The more examples, the better.
