I live in a condo with a balcony so NatureMill was the only option I was willing to consider. At first I kept it indoors. It is odourless when the lid is closed, but there is a strong organic mushroom/sourdour odour when you open the lid to add more stuff in. It's not overly unpleasant but I'm very sensitive to smells so I moved the NatureMill to the balcony (thankfully, I have a power outlet outside). Yes, the machine can be finicky but if you FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS, it works fine. I'll admit that I burned through my first machine by not doing so - NatureMill sent me a replacement. My new moto: Nothing stringy, only 1 inch pieces of stuff (my scissors are now very active! much better than using a knife to chop things up), don't overload. If it's too wet or smells sour, I add more pet pine litter or cross-shredded newspapers and baking soda. Above all else - being patient helps. There were times when I was tinkering the inside of the mixing chamber with a screw driver and a knife trying to free up a jam, instead of waiting forty-eight hours like the instructions advised - that wasn't a good idea and contributed to my first machine's demise. If you stick to the motto, you shouldn't be getting jams. I love it when the organic waste gets cooking and really steams up! I've been using the NatureMill Pro for a few months now. We do a lot of cooking using fresh veg and eat lots of fruits so we generate a large amount of organic waste. Add to that coffee grinds and egg shells. In fact, for just two people, I find that my NatureMill is not fast enough to process the organic non-meat waste we generate. The waste from eating just one watermelon or a couple of cantalopes will keep the machine busy for at least a week. In the meantime, I generate several small bags of organic waste waiting to be processed! So I get backlogged regularly. In two months I have generated 3 trays of compost and will have a fourth in a couple of days. It's rich, black and looks like a nice soil. There is one full tray in the machine being heat-cured, and I have the contents from two trays sitting in planters on the balcony being air-cured. I intend to air-cure the compost for at least two weeks before I put it on top of my growing suger snaps and tomato plants. I can comfortable say that I've reduced my landfill waste by around 70% since I bought the NatureMill. As for the future, I'm going to add small chopped up pieces of corn cob and used kleenex tissues next.

Where can I get one of these eating machines? I'll these years I've been chewing my own food like a sucker.

After doing some more research on humus it's very interesteing. It's my understanding that humus isn't fully understood and very difficult to explain. Just to help understand I've broken it down a bit. Humus by deffinision from Websters is " a brown or black complex variable material resulting from partial decomposition of plant or animal matter and forming the organic portion of soil" comes from "New Latin, from Latin, earth" From Wikipedia is close to the same deffinition "Humus (Latin - "soil ") is the organic material in soil lending it a dark brown or black colouration" And the deffinition for Colloid from Websters is "2 a: a substance that consists of particles dispersed throughout another substance which are too small for resolution with an ordinary light microscope but are incapable of passing through a semipermeable membrane b: a mixture consisting of a colloid together with the medium in which it is dispersed" And from Wikipedia "A colloid is a type of mechanical mixture where one substance is dispersed evenly throughout another." " A colloidal system may be solid, liquid, or gaseous" Aparently if you can let any organic matter decompose basicly with out any dirt it will form a jelly like substance once fully decomposed and in a stable condition. Depending on how well you create humus you could actually end up with nothing. If your humus becomes so stable that it will not provide any help to your plants. I would say this guy just did some research and took what nature already does and is just trying to sell it. I would like to see him actually product this. He may have theroy behind it but no experiance or ability to actually produce this. Take a look at Wikipedia I think they do a very good job explain humus. As far as our own compost. Well keep it cook'n we are still breaking down organic matter into stuff that helps our soils and plants and will eventually allow mother nature to create her own humus. Here is a link that might be useful: Wikipedia Humus

I would be quite reluctant to pay $400 (plus shipping?) for this gadget. OK, never in a million years would I try it. Even if you can return it, you would have to pay shipping both ways. There was no info on this site about it, so I used Google to find the site. This gadget is a medium-sized wastecan appliance that sits in the kitchen. For $15 you can buy enough hardware cloth to make a large mesh bin; for another $15 a compost thermoter will let you know how the pile is doing. If a main point is indoor composting, read up on worm composting. For under $50 you can buy a couple of plastic containers and the mail-order worms. Being one of those people suckered into a compost gadget, I favor the cheap do-it-yourself methods of composting. I paid $65 for a plastic bin from Jerry Baker which was not large enough to retain the heat. Then I paid $300+$50(s&h) for a tumbler. The tumbler required more work than just a simple pile would have. It was only after reading posts on Gardenweb that I discovered that cheap and simple bins are the best ways to compost.