I used one of these in the city, left it behind, and now have one in the country. It works well because most kitchen scraps are about 80% water, which drains into the ground or evaporates. They just reduce, and reduce, and what's left gets eaten by worms, bacteria etc, so the basket takes a long time to fill up. A good thing to have in a small city garden, especially in direct sunlight to speed the reduction.

When we had a dog we'd toss his poop in it, along with cooking oil and other stuff we don't want to put on the compost pile. We don't use ours much now, because we have room for pallet bins. But it's part of our compost bin display, along with an Earth Machine and worm bin.

We had the cone in the garden until my wife decided she didn't like artificial-green plastic in the middle of everything. Now it's beside the garden :)

Some people have posted here about cutting the bottom out of a trash can and sinking it, which would be a lot cheaper and is supposed to work well.

Thanks so much! Maybe it's not so silly! My daughter wants a dog and I don't want to deal with dog poop in my garden when she can't walk it, or forgets, to walk it, so this might partly solve that problem!

Maybe I'll save the money and try the trash can way.
Audrey

Maybe somebody here will post with details on their home-made digester. Annpat?
In the meantime I'll try to find the design somebody posted long ago.

Like many other similar commercialy available products this is an expensive way to get into composting, and the volume is much too small to provide enough end product. No container is needed to compost, and the only real reason to use one is neatness. The allusion to this one being a "solar" unit, indicating that sunlight somehow aids the digestion process which it does not except whatever soalr energy the plant material has utilized, is bordering on false advertising.

the volume is much too small to provide enough end product.

It is not meant to provide ANY end product. From the web site:

"Green Cone is designed to be a complimentary product to a compost bin but not meant to replace compost bins for breaking down yard waste"

"No compost is created with The Green Cone. Food waste is fully digested into the surrounding soil..."

Val

it's people

"Soylent Green is PEOPLE!" screamed Charlton Heston.

We're showing our age, Greenwood. LOL

Val

Like many other similar commercially available products this one is intended to save the user a lot of time researching and making a home made contraption. It is virtually animal-proof, which is good for city dwellers and for country dwellers worried about animal pests. And it is solar in that it works best in direct sun, the green plastic transmitting light so heat collects inside which, as I said above, speeds reduction greatly. It is not a composter, although it does make a small volume.

Ours was $90, which seemed expensive, and that was a price subsidized by the county which was selling it along with earth machines, maybe they still do. But it's still in good shape after 8 years.

Here's that info. It was written by one of the bright lights on this forum, who's moved on. Not sure why he bothers covering additions with straw - if you don't you get fruit flies and smell which don't matter if there's a cover. Also keep in mind this guy lives on the mild west coast, not the bitter cold in winter cursed rest of the country, so his contraption would work better for a longer part of the year.

Home made digester

Get a barrel, garbage pail or some sort of cylindrical thing and dig a hole in your utility area a bit larger and deeper than the vessel. Punch many holes into the bottom and sides of the vessel. Many.
Put drain rock in the bottom of the hole sufficient to hold the barrel at or just above ground level. Now back fill the circumference with drain rock.
Now you have a barrel buried into the ground, surrounded by drain rock. Make a heavy cover, lid for it. I use 3/4 plywood with pieces of 2x4 screwed to the bottom such that the 2x4 sits inside the circumference of the pail and the ply now can't skid off the pail if you tread on it or run the wheelbarrow over it.
Attach a handle of some sort so you can lift the lid. Mine is high enough that I can get my rake, hoe, manure fork, whatever under it and flip it up w/o having to bend down.
Inoculate the bottom with a handful of working compost.
Have a reasonable supply of browns at hand. I use ruined straw bales, just flake off about a third and leave it by the digester.
Into which we successfully add and compost chicken and turkey carcasses, any and all cooking oil or fat, cat waste, whatever dog waste is left by thoughtless owners or free running dogs, rib bones, crab shells and guts, clam, mussel and shrimp shells, squid and octopus leavings, fish remains and heads, etc.
Understand I live by the ocean and not all of this goes in at once!
In short and so as to not have my regular piles need constant attention, I use the digester for any yucky stuff.
The odd time it will smell but an extra handful of straw takes care of it. No turning, no issues other than having to weed-whack around it often. The moisture goes quick, the remainder breaks down into, well, compost.
Only icky part is when you need to empty it you have to dig out the partial stuff before you get to the done. And with it buried in the ground you are pretty much laying there, using a hand shovel and bucket like a kid at the beach.
We are a normal consuming family of four and in three/four years I have emptied it once. Didn't need to, it wasn't full, I just wanted to see what it looked like.

I've been using the Solarcone for over 10 years now. I like it a lot. We toss every food scrap we make into it - meat, bones, you name it. (Well, fresh veggie scraps go directly to the compost pile.) Paper towels and kleenex go in, too - they probably help to carbon-up the very wet and nitrogen-rich food mix.
I've found that for two people, the cone fills up every four years or so. Then I let it sit for a couple of months, then empty the EXTREMELY bad smelling contents into the middle of the regular compost pile for further aging.
So, we don't get a lot of compost product out of it, and the emptying is pretty unpleasant. But the big advantage is that our garbage never smells bad, and we often go many weeks without needing to take out any trash from the house.
We've never had any attention from critters - I do think that the enclosed nature of the cone is needed in an urban area like we live in.

Just found these postings and they motivated me to try this technique once again.

I had used a simple hole in the ground with a piece of plywood over the top for a couple years. It was amazing how much stuff just disappeared into this relatively small hole.

However, rats did feed on it and grew up to a foot and a half (not including the tail). The neighbors commented "we've never seen so many rats before, and huge!" So I stopped using it then.

This time, I cut the bottom off a 5 gallon plastic pail from Home Depot. Dug a hole and put the pail in, so that just 2 inches are above ground. Then I got a pole digger, and dug the hole down more to a total depth of 2.5 feet (digging with the pole digger is easy & fun). This way I figure, when this needs cleaning out. You can just use a pole digger again, no need to get close to the gunk.
Using plywood for the cover. Will epoxy a brick to the underside if needed to keep out the racoons.

Also, placed the digester next to an orange tree. Hoping this will provide all the nutrients needed and will eliminate having to fertilize the tree.

My father sank a bottomless, rugged metal garbage can into the ground behind our camp long before I was born, and that's where compostables always went. A snowplow knocked it out of the ground ten or so winters ago and ruined the can, but the lid was unscathed, and I have it still because I felt sentimental when I found a year handstamped into the lid: 1945 You would be amazed at the strength of the metal that garbage cans were made out of 65 years ago.

I have had one for several years. To operate as a digester the bottom basket has to be sunk into the ground. It was used for a year or two. It tended to fill up in the winter and needed to be kick started in the spring. It was just fed vegetable waste. I really wanted a composter. So, I dug it up and moved it, ripping out all the screws holding it together. Other composting methods were easier (vermicomposting)and it sat until we moved. I have been using it for compost (just sit it on the ground) for the last year. I emptied it on the weekend and little of what was in it was composted. It heats up and material settles; but after a year there was only an inch or so compost on the bottom. If nothing else it kills weed seeds so I'll keep using it.

"I have it still because I felt sentimental when I found a year handstamped into the lid: "

Besides that, have you ever tried to throw out a garbage can? They keep dumping it out and putting it back, never really noticing that it's empty and nearly demolished. I finally moved and just left one behind.