Electric Compost Bin Kitchen, Smart Kitchen Waste Composter, Food Composter Indoor/Outdoor, Food Cycler with 3L Capacity, Compost Machine for Apartment Countertop, Optimized Version V2

I wasted so much time considering whether this machine was worth the $. Now, I’m hooked!! Have you tried composting before? Do you have outside piles failing, drawing insects, rodents or raccoons? Are you successfully composting but still throwing out a bunch of food waste that can’t go on the outside piles (including meat products)? I DON’T !!! Now, ANY and ALL food waste, minus bones that will cause a jam, go in my counter composter! And, it has been wildly successful!! EVERY TIME!! It feels FANTASTIC to be successfully creating compost! FINALLY!! I am still perfecting the moisture content of the final product and yet it doesn’t actually matter. It all is compost and ready to use. I think I’ll start grabbing paper from the shredder to maximize output volume and create a drier final product. Sometimes I have just torn the paper by hand. Last night I grabbed a paper bag and tore it up into small strips. It worked great!! I have now run 5 loads of various sizes and have made about 2 gallons of compost without a failure!! I did manage to jam it on the second run when I added 3 avocado seeds. The machine beeped at me and gave me the “jam”error code. Most of the seeds had broken up just fine but one had caused the jam. It was easy to fix by using a sharp knife to slice the seed. No further issues since now I cut them prior to adding them. Can you tell how much I love this thing? I have hated throwing away waste from the fridge. Now, that ‘waste’ is something valuable that I no longer need to buy! I’ll take the win!!

I’m on my second one. Wanted to love it, but they don’t last. The gear in the bottom of the composting bin broke on the first one. They sent a replacement. The second worked for another half a year. The bin was very difficult to seat in the machine, but worked. Now I’m getting E01 and E02 error messages that I can’t clear. I believe the company may be out of business as I attempted contact months ago to purchase a new filter and received no response. Without a fresh filter, the composting process is smelly. They are not available anywhere. Irrelevant since the unit no longer works. I’ll stick with our regular, outdoor composting bin.

We were already avid kitchen composters, but decided to try an indoor food scrap "recycler" for a number of reasons. First, we live in a climate with cold snowy winters and realized our outdoor compost bin was essentially just a large container for frozen food scraps and the local wildlife had banded together to attempt to chew threw the composter to get at all of the delicious trash. Second, our countertop food scrap container always smelled and was constantly full. Third, fruit and other flies. I hate flies with a passion. I cannot underscore enough how much I hate them. Trying to do right by the planet is a lot harder when you have to deal with insects that are essentially constantly vomiting all over your house. Fourth, our local municipality offers a food waste recycling service, but at close to an additional $1,000 a year to my refuse bill, dumping food waste into a 5-gallon bucket on my porch does not solve for any of the other issues I've already laid out. So, I started to research alternative ways of reducing the overall amount of waste we generate, but in particular food waste. I settled on the Candle WasteCycler and have been using it for about six weeks. I don't have a large kitchen and liked the compact design and how it tilts forward, which as a person who only stands 5'2 means I don't have to grab a step stool before I load it. I also liked that we wouldn't have to add anything like compost starter to the machine to process the scraps. There is almost no smell when the machine is one, only a faint smell of something cooking and only when you're standing right in front of it. Even shrimp shells don't smell while being processes. The one claim I was skeptical about and have been happily proven wrong is that this little machine reduces the volume of the scraps it processes by 90%. It absolutely does! The picture is of a week's worth of processed scraps. Our WasteCycler can reduce a two-dozen rose bouquet from Costco into about two cups of dry, pre-compost that we mix into either potting soil or add to a flowerbed in our back yard. There is a setting that will create true compost if that is your goal, but we haven't tried it yet and honestly, mixing the pre-compost with potting soil or dirt is working just fine. In the six weeks we've been using the Cavdle WasteCycler, we've noticed that we are only filling about one garbage bag a week when we were filling three to four before. We run the machine once or twice a day depending on how much we cook. The WasteCycler does heat up, but the outside is cool to the touch. It does generate steam if the scraps are watery, so keep keep things clear in the back of it. I only say this because if you have a husband like mine who tucks things like mail behind stuff on the counter so he can "find it later" like a demented squirrel, you'll have to check that the back is clear before you turn it on. There is a drip tray in the back to catch any condensation, but the only "leaking" we've had is because someone forgot to put the drip tray back in place before turning it on. We've played around a lot with how to mix scraps. I don't recommend adding the entire bag of celery that went bad in your refrigerator at one time. Very wet scraps need to be mixed with dry ones. The WasteCycler can handle paper towels, so we use them to counter the wet stuff. I also don't recommend putting an entire loaf of moldy bread in it at once. I did, and let's just say that I flew to close to the sun on that one. I am incredibly impressed with this product so far. If you want to easily reduce your food waste and live in a small house like us or an apartment, the Cavdle WasteCycler is a really terrific option.

Too many things that I can't put in the machine. I wish I had spent $200 more to get a model that would just grind up bones. It's a little too much work trying to take bones out of food waste. Otherwise the machine works as it should. Although it would also be good to have a lid that would fit on the bucket, so I can keep the bucket out of the machine to collect waste.

I first bought the product when it was being crowd-funded. The initial version was a bit clunkier than the version 2 I have now. The initial version ended up having a fried fan, however, I was within the warranty window and got a new one. V2 is a lot better. The motor is smoother, doesn't get stuck, generates a bit less noise (even though v1 was quiet already) and the motor base snaps on easier than on v1. I love running my composter on a semi-daily basis and feeding my vegetable garden with the output!