Was the newspaper you found with the dead worms wet or dry?

One way to judge moisture is whether cardboard or paper in the bin is damp or not: if it dries out, that probably means not enough water for the worms. But I don't have experience with the Inn.

Are you finding dead worms clumped together, or is this a few scattered corpses?

Some of the clumps were wet and some were dry when I smash them (kind of hard to describe).

The worms were mostly in groups -- skinny and slimy.

Thank you for trying to help.

If you purchased a system with a spout, the spout should always be kept open to help with air flow. Each tray should maybe be stagered a bit to allow extra air flow. Usually in systems experiencing this problem it is too wet from too much food. I would advise tipping over the trays and filling the bottom with torn up dry egg carton material and putting the material back in on top of that. But since it may be too dry then maybe wet the egg carton material first before doing the same procedure. Although newspaper can be used it clumps. Corrigated cardboard or a few cardboard coasters from under restaurant sodas would be nice to add.

For the worms, if you've still got some alive a few things you can do depending on how much stuff you have in it and how much you're willing to do. Also, if you have finished VC in the bottom of the inn, could be worms hiding on there also.

If it's not that full, you can always remove all the live worms you can, empty the inn of the stinky stuff, fill it back with moist cardboard and put the live worms back in. Basically starting again.

For the foul stuff you've removed, you might have cocoons in there but if it's lots of dead worms you probably don't want to go digging for them, the smell is horrible. If you had somewhere out of the way (for the smell), maybe have it in a open container and mix in cardboard again to help air it out and get it back to normal. Once the smell is gone, might even be able to feed back into the inn.

If it's pretty full and you don't want to go digging through it all, you could try adding some cardboard to the smelly stuff. Take out what worms you can easily find, mix in more bedding in order to try and air it out. Then add more cardboard on top again for somewhere for the works to run to and put the saved worms in that. Again, could be some worms on the bottom of the inn waiting until things get better before coming out.

For the cause, very odd. As there's always an open bottom it's a bit impossible to flood and drown them. I keep a small bucket under it just incase I have too much. Due to too much melon I've had water drip out from the bottom and no adverse effects. If you had clumps you had to 'smash' to open, it sounds like too dry. Should always be damp. In the inn the edges can get dry, but the core should always be damp. Due to this, the more bedding you have in there, the easier it is (dries out less quickly). I loaded mine about half full with just cardboard when starting mine, then added worms. I also much prefer cardboard (plain shipping box cardboard) over shredded newspaper as it takes longer to dry out and doesn't clump like newspaper does. The stiffness makes it able to keep airflow going when you mix it in. You can always sprinking water through the mesh lid if things look dry.

Here's a link (has pictures) of another thread where someone had problems with an inn, although it ended up being an issue of very few or wrong worms. Some other thoughts and ideas there.
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/verm/msg0319491713240.html?16

From what I have read, I do not think you can get the worm inn too wet. The cloth bag allows extreme air flow. Maybe the worms got too DRY and died before you wet it. I find worms alive after 48 hours of tea brewing. What, how, and how much have you been feeding?

Thing is Compost, if she's been feeding carefully there's no way she should be getting that much heat generation. Doesn't have the quantities and the worm inn with it's aeration is so good at removing heat anyway. It would also be local and the worms move away just like they can move away from dryness, which is why I never worry about heat generation.

She also said she found the live worms slimy and skinny, but also found dead ones and dry clumps. If her young system is still mostly bedding, that means lots of aeration still and with small feedings even with fruit it will be very small amounts of added liquid. We're not talking it going bone dry, but the whole system being drier than it should be. Also, dry cardboard does not equal dry peatmoss. If it had the same effect on worms, worms would be shipped in waste paper not peatmoss.

As you mentioned with the moving to moisture. What if the only moisture is the feeding area with a high nitrogen feed that tends to go goopy, anaerobic with a bit of ammonia release thrown in. Then the worms would have a choice of being dry or going to something anaerobic and high in PH (as anaerobic decay causes this). Neither one by itself should cause that much of a die off as the worms just migrate away from either problem.

If nothing global has happened (like flooding in bins, which you can't get in this case) it's weird that worms got caught out somehow. Definately need to hear back on what and how the feedings were done.

BTW, how much bedding do you have in the Inn? One rule of thumb, you can never have too much bedding. One extra bonus with the inn (and most FT systems it seems). As the bottom doesn't get soggy, you don't end up with compacted bedding stuck in the bottom, it all gets eaten in the end. So no need to be stingy.

I thank everyone for taking the time to help.... I think I figured it out. My great grandma passed away so we had someone take care of the farm. I had food for the worms in freezer bags (3/4 cup) . The caretaker did feed the worms that food, but had also heard that worms like chicken layer mash and fed that too : ).

I've had a worm bin before (years back but then moved) and I do know they like the mash, but since my inn is a newly established bin, I was being super careful of their feedings and would not have fed this yet.

I thought it kind of smelled like ammonia...

I took it outside last night - added crushed eggshells and more cardboard and peat this morning, I put it back in the house so it has a constant temp again and I'll just let it sit for a couple of weeks, I guess, and see how that goes.

Again, thank you for your time.

That sounds like it. A big dump of food into a new bin. Good luck with the revival of the worms, sorry to hear about your great grandma.

Yes I understand all that and never said it can't heat, as I mentioned it is the amounts. If you have a small amount of heating in a large area the overall effect is going to me minimal. This has been all talked over before in another thread. To sum it up, 3/4 of a cap of a slightly heated feeding is not going to cook 50lbs of VC/bedding in the rest of the bin. It's why when you hot compost you need THREE cubic feet of feed to reach hot composting temps, you have to contain the heat with quantity. And you're not even using the term correctly. Hot composting is composting in large quantities with certain materials to reach certain temperatures. This is just food material warming up due to bacterial growth in a process you can use to do hot composting IF you have enough material. You can't hot compost a cup. So as much as you want to think a little heating in a little area will heat the whole bin, it's not going to happen. And if everyone starts to worry about it in such small quantities they're going to limit unnecessarily what they add due to the 'bad' nitrogen. It's always is and has been about quantity VS bin.

And about the peatmoss (I'd already seen the video), what you said was totally irrelevant as it's the same for cardboard. It also has little nutritious content and little N. The reason they ship as he mentioned is it has airflow (like cardboard), it's inert (like cardboard) and has good moisture holding properties (cardboard, not so much). If you've ever recieved a shipment, you'll know you can add water to it and it absorbs it, truely dry peatmoss doesn't, like bone dry soil it doesn't like water and takes a long while to soak. In that same vid at the same time, you'll hear him say its got to get to the right amount of moisture and if you look at his hands, the peatmoss is sticking all over them because it's damp. This is not going to be the same as dry paper and thus worms would be happy in dry paper/cardboad, which is what I was pointing out. It was a bad comparision.

BTW on the peatmoss and heating, again a very different case between worrying about heating in something where the worms are living and stuck in (small package), and in a bin where a feeding that heats is only a small portion of the whole bin and the worms are free to move elsewhere.