Food wastes can be an eyesore, especially if they are left for many hours in your kitchen waste bin. You have either to deal with odor or insects or both.
A food cycler comes as waste management equipment. It is a small appliance the size of your bin, but it reduces your household’s organic waste volume beyond 80%.
If you got a food cycler, then you have a worthwhile investment for your kitchen. Besides its sleek design and appearance, you will minimize your organic kitchen waste, such as food scraps, at minimal cost and get some compost for your vegetable garden.
The machine works through an automated drying, grinding, and cooling program to reduce food scraps into eco-friendly chips. The chips are complete organic compost that enriches your garden by providing all the nutrients that you seek in fertilizers.
In this guide, we will hold you through this luxurious, speedy kitchen countertop machine capable of grinding your compost within hours. So, is a food cycler worth it? We will answer this and other possible questions that you may have regarding the waste processor.
Read through to find out how the machine works, what you can put in for composting, the pros and cons, don’ts, and acquiring a food cycler.
What is a food cycler?
A food cycler is an electric kitchen appliance that helps you sort out your kitchen’s organic wastes by grinding and processing them into helpful compost manure. The organic wastes include fruit rids, vegetables, food scraps, and dry leaves.
This stunning machine has four functions;
Changeable Filter
A food cycler’s filter consists of a carbon filtration system that works by sucking in the gases and odor of your kitchen waste. It also sanitizes your kitchen waste by killing the pathogens that are present in the decomposing mixture. After a few months, the filter fills up and thus requires a regular change to function effectively.
- Grinder
The grinder is the core function of the system. It is also the largest of all the other features. Your compost spends several hours in this compartment whose primary process involves grinding.
The grinder functions as an agitator by turning at high speed to crumble all the stuff. It works simultaneously with the dryer that aerates and dries your compost ingredients.
2. Dryer
When you grind food waste, it becomes a pulp. The pulpy mixture will be messy and will not mix well with your garden soil.
The dryer comes in handy to dry the matter and transform it into valuable compost. As the grinder agitates the waste, the dryer aerates and heats the waste simultaneously to get a dry outcome at the end of the process.
3. Coolant Feature
During the grinding process, the compost gets hot. Inside the food, the cycler is a removable bucket that holds your by-products. This bucket gets hot and its contents too.
The work of the coolant is to make the removable bucket and its contents safe for you to handle. With a coolant, it takes a few minutes to aerate and cool the bucket. Cooling is also the very last process of a food cycler.
What Can Go In Food Cycler?
You already know and understand what a food cycler is and how it functions. The next step is for you to know the dos and don’ts. That includes what can go into the machine and what can’t.
Most kitchen organic wastes can go into a food cycler and convert into compost, but not every waste is friendly to your machine.
Some stuff will slow down your food cycler’s operations, while others will damage it beyond repair. To avoid breakages, the first thing to have in mind separating waste during production. By this, we mean during food preparation.
Waste separation makes it easy for you to handle the compost. It also eliminates the possibility of separating messy, mixed-up garbage.
To know what to put into the food cycler, we have unwrapped several kitchen waste categories. With this list, you will not have to dip your hands in a contaminated garbage bin to fish out what can go into your machine. Have a look!
What to put in a food cycler;
- Vegetables: cabbages, kales, spinach, carrots, lettuce, French beans, et cetera.
- Tubers: arrowroots, potatoes, yams
- Green bananas and their peels
- Fruit and their rinds
- Food: Non-oily or greasy food, including cooked beans, corns, lentils, peas, et cetera.
Food scraps that should not go into your food cycler;
- Grease/oil
- Hard seeds like avocado, peach, and pear seeds
There is a wide range of kitchen scraps great for composting but slow down the food cycler processes. Use them in small bits by mixing with more from the safe list. They include moisture-rich, dense, and starchy kitchen wastes.
Foods that slow your food cycler processes;
- Starchy food including bread, rice, mashed potatoes, pasta, and stuffing
- Citrus fruit rinds
- High sugar fruits like melons, grapes, and cherries
- Condiments
- Soups and sauces
- Dressings
- Jellies and deserts
- Marmalades
Items Not To Put In A Food Cycler
- Water
- Metallic objects
- Sanitary waste
- Plasticware
- Paint
- Pieces of Wood Stones
- Glass
- Chemical compounds like salt
- Gum
- Any other inorganic material.
Advantages Of The Food Cycler
If you don’t have a food cycler in your kitchen, you miss out on tons of benefits. Figure out the number of trips you and your family member make to the kitchen.
Also, several times you throw fruit rids, banana peels, vegetable wastes, and more in your bin. You will not believe the food wastes from the kitchen. The garbage truck makes two or more trips to collect the mess.
You can figure out to manage the waste and benefit through a food cycler. The appliance compacts and converts food scrap mixture into useful compost manure. Besides these benefits, there are many more;
- Cheap, easy, and fast way to make organic fertilizer
Making organic fertilizer has never been easy. The compost pit processes are long and tedious. It could even take you up to six months to rot your compost to create ready-to-use fertilizer.
With a food cycler, all the processes run within 24 hours. The short procedure involves;
- Sorting the waste
- Put the sorted waste into the food cycler bin
- Plugging in the power cable
- Pressing start.
You can choose to wait until the bucket is full to process the contents. Although in little bits, eventually, you will have composed up to a ton of organic fertilizer cheaply from your kitchen.
2. Eliminates Odors And Insects
If you want to eliminate insects and odor from your kitchen, get a food cycler. The machine is compact and comes with a filter that sucks in the odors, sanitizes the compost, and keeps your home free from insects and other crawling animals.
3. Go Green
One of the most recommended ways of going green is through waste management. A food cycler is one of those machines that help environmentalists achieve environmental reclamation.
In an era when everyone is going green, you cannot afford to be left out. Make use of this unique machine and also benefit from organic compost manure for your garden.
4. It Saves You On Space
Food cyclers have a compact design to fit in your kitchen. You will not require to build an extra shelf to accommodate one.
The corner of your countertop is enough to place the food cycler. All the other processes happen inside the unit, which also saves you from mess and space.
5. It Saves You On Resources
Have you ever worked out the number of dollars you have ever dished out to refuse collection companies? It could run into thousands of dollars. Well, a food cycler is worth just a few hundred dollars!
You may not pull yourself out of a refuse collection contract, but you will minimize the frequency of their visits to your home.
With a food cycler, you can take care of some organic waste, pile up the rest for a week or two and then give the collectors a call when you cannot accommodate more trash. That is all courtesy of a food cycler.
6. A Food Cycler Ensures Top Hygiene
One of the unwritten rules of the kitchen is hygiene. No one questions that, but how do you maintain that with a regular waste bin full of leftovers and vegetable scraps? Is a food cycler worth it? Is the appliance hygienic?
The answer narrows down to acquiring a food cycler. You will separate the organic kitchen waste and throw it into the compartment awaiting processing.
The unique machine sanitizes the waste contents so that you can handle the kitchen waste without any contamination.
Disadvantages Of The Food Cycler
A food cycler comes with countless benefits, but you will still encounter a few cons with the machine. Here are the disadvantages of a food cycler;
Cost
Food cyclers are pricey. To get one, you have to plan your budget and squeeze out a few hundred dollars. Also, every electric gadget comes with a maintenance cost.
The filter requires a change every three to four months, and also, there is the normal wear and tear of the appliance.
A food cycler runs on electric power. Unless you entirely operate all your electrical gadgets using a generator, your utility company will slap you with slightly higher bills than before.
No Natural Composting Process
A food cycler does not wait for food waste to decompose naturally. That means the natural beneficial bacteria, nematodes, and fermentation processes will lack in your organic manure.
If you intend to use a food cycler to get compost manure for your garden, you may have to supplement your soil with beneficial bacteria and nematodes to improve the soil.
Is A Food Cycler Worth It?
There is no doubt that a food cycler’s benefits outweigh the disadvantages. With this unique appliance in your kitchen, you can manage your waste effectively. You will cut down your scraps up to ten times and save your money.
So, if you live in an apartment and do not have a garden, is a food cycler worth it? Yes, food cycler is worth every effort. It will minimize your garbage by 80%.
The appliance keeps your kitchen clean and free from flies, rodents, and other creeping animals.
A food cycler is safe to use, hygienic, and supplies your garden with pure compost fertilizer. Acquiring a food cycler is an excellent and wise way to spend your money.
Besides, you can make money out of the processed piles of compost manure by selling it to your neighbors who have gardens.
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Bottom Line
A food cycler organizes your kitchen waste by digesting your food waste without emitting any gases. The aerobic process takes up to 24 hours to give you safe, clean, and organic compost manure beneficial for your garden.
With the equipment, you reduce the refuse in your compound and keep the environment hygienically safe for your family.
You also save money by cutting on garbage collection trips to your home. A food cycler is a worthy investment and a perfect way of household food waste management.
