This is what our happy users have to say about their experiences with the Ridan Composting system.
See for yourself just how Ridan food waste composters are helping customers across the country to improve their green credentials, reduce their waste disposal bills, lower their Co2 emissions, and show children (and adults!) just how easy it is to produce quality compost from food waste.
The Ridan is working really well. We need to educate people on how to reduce food waste; Birmingham could be a lot more sustainable as a city. Our long-term aim is to help our community to waste less in the first place but we also want to get local businesses interested in recycling excess food in a carbon neutral way.
We’ll be saying, "come and have a look at this, you can have one of these Ridan’s in your back yard; it composts your food waste, helps the environment and brings down your refuse bills!
We use our Ridan at Waterperry Gardens for composting a mixture of food waste from the teashop and house and green waste from the walled garden.
The compost is used in the walled garden where we grow a selection of vegetables for the teashop and house. We endeavour to make what is grown there as organic and biodynamic as we possibly can.
Our handyman Allen has taken ownership of the whole process and takes some pride in what he produces from the strange cylindrical machine.
We have found the service, advice and easy communication we get from the nice people at Ridan to be brilliant.
I have been using the ridan medium for 2 years now and I am very satisfied with the end result of a black brown compost.
The main trick is to keep the moisture OK (add more or less wood pellets) and then temperature stays easily around 55 Celsius in summer and winter. The Ridan is placed in the shade of a high hedge.
It took some time to find the balance but we ended up with an average of 12kg fresh kitchen waste (peelings, cut offs etc) on a daily basis with 4 double hands of pressed wood pellets (conifer), 1 small trowel full of chicken pellets and 1 trowel of wood ash (mixed wood) wood pellets (conifer) .
In this way it was good to oversee the process for the students.
We filled up 1 hot box in approx. 4 months and added regularly 2 shovel fulls of half-ready garden compost teeming with worms.
Finally the compost was mixed in the outside compost heaps and matured for 9 months before use in the crops.
https://www.rmlt.org.uk/freeman-biodynamic-garden-at-high-riggs
Following a recent visit Karyn Punchard, Director of the Dorset Waste Partnership, said:
“It was great to see how Damers First School has incorporated the Ridan food waste composter into their outstanding eco-friendly practices. While the Dorset Waste Partnership operates a kerbside food waste collection service, we always emphasise how composting is best for the environment and the public purse. By recycling their food waste on the school site in a clean and convenient manner, Damers First School is not only saving money but helping to educate pupils and their families about the environment. Well done to everyone involved.”
in the summer time our Ridan is flat out with 400 litres a week and then it is quiet for 3 months over the winter. The beauty is that it just keeps on working no matter what I do to it. Very little if any care and maintenance and it just deals with whatever is put inside it.
Congratulations on making a well engineered and well thought out unit.
I’m really impressed with the Ridan. We are putting through a steady flow of kitchen waste and bits and pieces. We’ve settled on using the sawdust pellets as a carbon source. I tried to shred our own cardboard, but couldn't come up with an efficient, economic shredder which could handle our cardboard waste, so I’ve settled for the pellets right now, which are easy to use and store.
The Ridan is powering away, cruising at anywhere between 45-55 centigrade. What really impresses me with the design is the combination of robustness and providing the appropriate biological operating conditions. The gearing on the tumbler shaft really makes turning practical. The chimney effect drawing air through the chamber works well, and the insulation allows for maintaining good temperatures.
We have already had some output, for 2-3 weeks now, which comes out a nice consistent semi composted mass, which we are feeding to our worms in the basement. The output is almost odourless, and stabilised enough that I am confident that it won’t attract rodents in our basement – so all around I’m very happy.
So thanks for your great Ridan – it’s already become a much loved colleague.
'We have been running for a few months now, the first compost has just started coming through the machine and I am really pleased with its quality and the speed with which it has composted. The waste in the Ridan is much hotter than the waste we used to hold in our old tumblers, you can now see the water vapour rising from it as soon as you lift the lid off. We are not hitting the 50 degrees plus suggested on your website, possibly because at the moment we are using well decomposed leaf mould rather than wood pellets as the carbon component. This might also explain why the compost is coming out wetter than it probably should. But as I said the compost produced by the Ridan is good stuff (despite not operating under optimal conditions), will dry off in the finishing container and we are saving money and being greener by not buying in wood pellets.'
Matthew Lawson
IPO Office Newport
May 2018
Oh my god, it has been great!
WE have reduced our black bag waist by 1 whole bag a day. The kids love using it and we have used the compost on beds already! Nobody can believe how great they work! Thanks so much! (Oct 21st 2016)
Our Ridan composter is working very well at the moment hopefully producing lots of feed for our orchard come the spring.
I have two children that come daily to help with the compost.They really enjoy coming and find it very easy to use.
We normally put around one bucket of food waste in each day but this can vary slightly.Recently we noticed that it was coming out quite dry so we put in a little less sawdust, we will have to wait a week or so to see if this has made a difference.
I am also going to start a gardening club during which we will be using the compost, so the children will help out with this too.
Just a quick email to thank you for your help, the composter is steaming away nicely and we have our first school group in at the end of September so I hope to involve them and hopefully get us both some local publicity , I am also putting together a bid to to ask for some money to purchase one of your composters ( fingers crossed !) Thanks again
As a organic business it’s important that we and our customers have a better understanding of waste. Food waste that goes to landfill is bad for the environment; it causes methane production and if not managed correctly can contribute to global warming.
So when we were looking at purchasing a composter to reduce waste going to land fill Ridan seemed the best company to work with. The service we have received has been truly professional, any problems we have encountered they have resolved almost immediately.
So when it comes to ‘creating a closed loop’ system and benefiting from the opportunities we can create from sharing this with our customers then we all should work with Ridan.
I am amazed at how well the Ridan works, how easy it is to use and how quickly it composts, as a result we now only have one bin collected every week instead of two and we have plenty of rich compost for the garden
By installing the Ridan™ Composting System, not only have we raised awareness of how much waste we produce on site, we have also created a keen interest in how best to reduce or recycle it. The Ridan has created a big stir and captured a keen following amongst both inmates and staff due to its simple yet very effective operation. Financially the Ridan system will pay for itself within three years, but morally it is priceless’
It is rare these days to buy a product which exceeds your expectations like the Ridan, food waste to usable compost takes just 10 weeks. Our tomatoes have been grown in the compost produced and are bigger and better than ever before, a lovely fine potting compost!
We are using the Ridan Composter and it's running just nicely. We produce just the right amount of compost to keep our landscape contractor in fertiliser for our surrounding gardens/ plants
Of all the different products the Trust has trialled over the last few years, we have found the Ridan composter to be the most suitable for our requirements, being simple to operate, cheap to run and inexpensive to buy and install; it also delivers an excellent quality compost.