Lomi Composter Review

Lomi is an electric countertop “smart” composter that claims to be able to reduce your food waste by 80%. We reviewed it and put it to the test.

Composting is a critical activity for gardeners. Breaking down food scraps into compost provides nutrients for your plants, improves water holding capacity in the soil and supports the soil food web. But composting can also be a goal for anyone who’s eco-conscious and concerned about the amount of food waste that unnecessarily goes to landfills.

What if you could reduce your household food waste by 80% as Lomi claims? As a years-long composter I was very interested to review Pela Earth’s “smart composter” to see if it’s worth the price.

How much food is wasted in the U.S. and how can composting help reduce it?

In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply, [equaling] approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food… Wasted food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills and represents nourishment that could have helped feed families in need.

US Food & Drug Administration

Composting is one step in reducing the food waste problem. Regardless of how efficient your meal planning is, whether your family is 1 or 12, and even if you eat every morsel on your plate, there will always be inedible parts of food that can be composted (apple cores, carrot peels, nut shells, beef bones, seeds from tomatoes, corn husks, etc.).

And this seemingly minimal organic waste really mounts up: If you’re not composting, it’s going in your trash and then sent to landfills, where it generates methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And compost has many benefits when it’s added to the soil: it reduces the need for chemical fertilizers; improves crop yields; aids reforestation efforts; improves water holding capacity; helps sequester carbon; and helps remediate polluted soils.

Countertop composters are a great entry point

The problem with composting for most people, is how to do it on a small scale without making your house smell like a Hudson River garbage barge? Fortunately, the new generation of kitchen countertop composters makes composting available to almost anyone. No big outdoor compost bin is needed, no compost bucket under the sink, and your kitchen won’t smell like the business end of a skunk.

Lomi composter features

Devices like Lomi are becoming quite popular. They’re categorized as kitchen composters, home composters, countertop composters, compost machines, smart food waste composters, or electric composters. Some are industrial grade, some are the size of your kitchen wastebasket, and some look dope next to your Breville toaster. Lomi is one of the latter.

Lomi has a sleek design and will look right at home in the highest of high end kitchens. For the most part, the composter is designed intuitively – its operation is pretty easy to figure out even if you hate reading manuals like I do. And speaking of manuals, you just need to click the QR code on the paper manual to get a complete video tutorial on your smartphone that walks you through how to set up your Lomi and how to operate it.

Lomi has 3 modes

Grow Mode:

• This is the mode that’s best for adding Lomi “dirt” to indoor plants and gardens. This mode is only for food scraps. The compost can be diluted 1:10 with potting soil for your indoor plants or added directly to your garden soil. It can also be added to your compost pile or city composting program bin. Takes 16-20 hours.

Eco-Express:

• The “dirt” from this mode can be added to your home compost pile or your green bin. This is the fastest mode and produces “dirt” in 2-5 hours. This is only for food waste and not bioplastics.

Lomi Approved:

• This is partially finished compost that can be added to your green bin or to your compost pile. This mode can break down bioplastics and recyclable paper packaging, including most of the packing materials that come with your Lomi. Food scraps must also be added. See the list of which non-food items can be added on their website here. Takes 5-8 hours.

How does the Lomi composter work?

Lomi uses a combination of heat, grinding, air, and microorganisms supplied in the Lomi pods (included) for aerobic decomposition. In essence it mimics what happens in a sunlight heated compost bin, only much faster and on a smaller scale (the grinding in an outdoor bin is supplied by the human who chops up the yard waste). Foul odors are eliminated with 2 charcoal filters: one that sits aside the compost bucket and one that sits in the rear of the composter.

How Lomi performed in our tests

Lomi composter test #1

Our first bucket of kitchen waste in the Lomi composter is pictured below. Underneath the spinach and carrots are banana peels, 2 bowls of moldy, science-y experiment-looking Jell-O from the back of the fridge, and a few days worth of damp coffee grinds. A pretty wet goopy mess, and the kind of mixture that Lomi does not recommend, but we like pushing boundaries. We set it to Grow Mode, threw in 1 of the Lomi tablets and ran it until it shut off about 16 hours later.

The mixture below looks pretty nasty right? Even though it’s a goopy mess, there is absolutely no foul odor which tells us that the microorganisms in the tablet did their job very well. So did the charcoal filters. It’s perfectly fine for the garden and we tossed it in between our lettuces.

Lomi Test #2

For our next test we went in the opposite direction: We only added corn husks and the very tough bottoms of the cobs from 4 ears of corn. We again threw in 1 Lomi tablet and 3 tablespoons of water, as instructed in the video tutorial. Again we ran it on Grow Mode until it stopped. During that time we noticed that Lomi was working considerably harder than it did in test 1. Much more grinding, which was to be expected from the cob bottoms (actually part of the corn stalk).

This time we had just the opposite result. Lomi shredded and dried the corn husks to something that resembled powder and shredded paper. Again, there was zero odor and this was perfectly fine for the garden. We threw it on our sweet peppers.

Lomi Test #3

Test 3 was to see how good the Lomi composter is at breaking down compostable plastics in Lomi Approved mode. Material made in this mode is not to be added directly to plants, but is intended for adding to your green bin or compost pile for further breakdown. This was our finish-cleaning-out-the-fridge and cabinet batch: pasta, sauerkraut, a little kielbasa, overripe bananas and banana peels, a handful of Cap’n Crunch (not that we eat that…), figs, and some other mysterious organic substances that used to be edible. To it we added cut pieces of the compostable plastic bag Lomi arrived in (Lomi recommends no more than 10% plastics in any batch). And just for fun, some marigolds from the garden. We set it to Lomi Mode and let it cook for about 8 hours until it stopped.

Lomi composter review conclusions:

If you’re an ecowarrior you’ll love Lomi. You can reduce your food waste by up to 80%, and compost a portion of your plastic waste and paper waste. The Lomi “dirt” can be added directly to your garden, your compost pile, your indoor plants or your city composting program’s bin. Having said that, some may find the price a little intimidating.

For gardeners who need a lot of compost, Lomi is just too small. But it can be of great help over winter when the compost pile is frozen. I’ll be able to keep composting and dump it on the pile. I look forward to further improvements to Lomi and hopefully a larger capacity.

Lomi Pros

• Sleek, attractive design.
• Easy to operate.
• No foul odors.
• Scrape your food waste right into the Lomi bucket – no smelly transfer of rotting food.
• Charcoal filters are effective and easy to remove, fill, and replace.
• Composting bucket is made of durable metal.
• Well done video tutorials.

Lomi Cons

• Small capacity (at least for me. I use lots of compost and could literally run this non-stop).
• Bad chatbot on the website – I was unable to get an answer to a very simple question.
• Mode indicators are very small and might be hard to see for people with vision impairment.
• While running, the sound may or may not be annoying for some. It makes about as much noise as a modern dishwasher without the “wet” sounds. It’s extra noisy if it’s grinding tough materials like corncobs.
• Pricey.