18 day Berkeley hot composting

So there are some really great instructions online about this fast composting method, including various materials that can be used for your green and brown matter.

I've started to put my daily coffee grounds in a five gallon bucket of water instead of my regular compost bin. I also have a large willow oak tree that drops lots of leaves in the fall.

So for my 25:1 carbon to nitrogen ratio I'm thinking of primarily using these small leaves and this coffee liquid, plus some microbial innoculent from the regular compost. Is there any reason that this rather undiversified combo would not work for this method? Has anyone tried anything similar?

It's important to have enough carbon at hand. You can always boost the nitrogen peeing on the pile.

I did this method last year and was making a new pile each weekend. From my experience the coffee and leaves are some of the best materials for the compost. I was also adding urine soaked sawdust too and had crazy hot compost.

If your ratios are good then it will be fine, compost is a beautiful thing as it works with just about anything. Even a big pile of leaves alone can become great compost if you turn it and wet it properly. Those two ingredients you listed are both great fungal foods and could yield a nice fungal-dominant compost, although that’s a bit different than super fast hot compost which is largely bacterial. You may need some grass clippings/weeds/urine to get it kickstarted depending on how ages the leaves are. Good luck!

Thanks everyone. For a fuller picture, I'm hoping to use this as a supplemental heating strategy in the winter for the greenhouse I will be building. So ~18 days bacterial hot decomposition, and spread that material through out the greenhouse for the fungi to take over. And then start a new round of hot composting.

Youtube channel Edible Acres has some great compost heated greenhouse videos if you want to see a working model:

Thanks Krisz, that was really neat video and has a number of conceptual overlaps with my design. The key difference is that I'll be maintaining a smaller compost inside my greenhouse. He's losing a lot of heat to the outdoors, by giving up a few square feet, I can truly passively harness a much larger amount of heat. And yes my foundation will be insulated so that the thermal mass of the floor of my compost won't dissipate the heat into the surrounding soil.

So I had been thinking I would locate the compost on the south side of the greenhouse so it would receive the most radiation and keep moving along efficiently. But is this really necessary? Assuming the greenhouse is insulated enough to keep the plants happy through the winter, shouldn't that also be enough to keep the compost from shutting down even without solar exposer? It would be better space utility to locate the compost on the north side and free up more growing space on the south side. I'm in US zone 7 and the north wall will be insulated.