User queries and solutions
The Bioverter team welcomes feedback to expand our knowledge pool. We'll investigate to seek answers and where necessary, carry out trials. Our solutions will be shared as user tips here.
An excellent food for earthworms is fresh compost made from nutrient-rich kitchen scraps.
You can use the compost to nourish earthworms and grow their numbers. Put it in a safe space in your garden and let earthworms burrow their way to the food.
We suggest you leave compost harvests in a safe space like a worm pop-up. You’ll magnify the benefits through a build up of earthworms, worm casts and rested (mature) compost.
Fun fact 1: Free-range earthworms dig tunnels which help water and air flow deep into your soil. Plant roots can extend further along the tunnels to obtain minerals from your soil.
Their activity also loosens the soil and relieves areas where the soil has compacted together.
Earthworms excrete worm casts which are clumps of plant nutrition and swallowed soil. These casts are good for your plants and soil.
Fun fact 2: Worm farms use only surface feeders like red and tiger worms. Farmed to produce castings without soil, these worms are unable to improve your garden.
You can feed Bioverter as normal right up until you leave. Composting will keep going at a gradually slower rate as the microbial communities inside Bioverter adjust themselves to a slowdown in food supply.
Just remember to empty both your compost collecting Basket and liquid Tray before you leave to make sure they don't overfill.
When you get back, resume feeding and the compost microbes will come back to life.
There are natural compounds which can cause compost juice to froth when you add water to dilute the juice.
These natural frothing compounds can be found to varying degrees in food such as legumes and vegetables like beets. They will not harm your plants.
Compost flies are tiny black insects that don’t bite or carry disease, but they breed incredibly fast and are a real nuisance in large numbers. Adults lay eggs on moist food waste.
You may first notice larvae with segmented body crawling over your waste. They change from an initial whitish colour to dark brown when mature. Take corrective action before you see many brown larvae.
The larvae eat high nitrogen food. Their rapid increase indicates there is a lot of high nitrogen waste in your Bioverter, so start to restore the imbalance with a top layer of carbon waste. For the next 4 weeks, starve them out by adding waste mixes with more carbon than nitrogen waste.
It may take several weeks to get rid of the larvae and adult flies.
Some larvae may make it to the next life cycle stage and form a protective casing or cocoon. You may see cocoons in your compost harvest.
A preventive routine is preferred, so use our feeding tips.
A little bit of seepage is normal. Spray some water on your Bioverter and wipe the area with a cloth or soft brush to remove the dribbles.
However, if your Bioverter is weeping regularly and developing a bulge, this indicates that you have a sticky mass of matter causing a logjam.
Here's how to fix it:
- Remove the tray and place a piece of cardboard in the cavity to catch the compost.
- Empty your basket.
- Wearing plastic gloves, pull out as much of your sticky compost as you can reach from underneath. You want to get rid of the blockage.
- If your Bioverter is full, remove sticky compost from above too. Use a garden trowel and a bucket to collect fresh scraps before taking out the gooey materials. Be gentle with the inside walls of your Bioverter - leave some gooey matter on these walls to get your returned scraps cooking quickly again.
- If your Bioverter walls are still bulging after you’ve cleared the logjam, pop a $5 luggage strap around the problem area to get it back in shape.
Rest your sticky compost:
- The sticky compost that you have removed can be rested in the usual way. It may look lumpy for a while and will take longer to rest.
- Keep it in the shade and covered in a damp cloth. Resting will turn it into super compost.
Keep Bioverter running smoothly:
- Keep it in the shade and covered in a damp cloth. Resting will turn it into super compost.
- Whole dry leaves, paper and cardboard are high carbon materials that take a long time to break down fully. Inside Bioverter, they can form a very sticky mass when added in excess.
- Follow our feeding suggestions to help you achieve balanced composting.
Coffee grounds are a good compost feedstock. Simply add coffee grounds to your kitchen waste but limit the amount of coffee grounds to less than a quarter (25%) of the total waste fed to Bioverter.
Tip: Break up compacted coffee grounds to ensure all is used to make compost.
You could apply coffee grounds as a thin layer of mulch on soil surfaces. Take care to ensure the flow of water and air into your soil isn't blocked because coffee grounds mat easily to form a barrier.
Fun fact: Coffee beans are the processed seeds of a fruit tree. During roasting of the beans to develop coffee flavour, their thin skins detach and are collected as waste chaff.
Coffee roasters generate vast amounts of chaff and may be willing to give away their waste for you to reuse its valuable nutrients.
We found from trials that a mix of chaff and coffee grounds in a 2:1 ratio is balanced for composting. You can add this mix of (carbon-rich) chaff and (nitrogen-rich) coffee grounds as a layer between everyday kitchen scraps.