Seeking tool design for a compost sifter

Farm Hack
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I have a wheel barrow and a few hundred gallons of compost that should be finished in a few weeks. I need to build a sifter and have not done that part of this process before.

I’m guessing a wooden frame a little bigger than the wheelbarrow would allow two people to shovel material on top and shake it through. Maybe 1/2" wire?

I plan to return sticks, etc. to the pile as structure to oppose compaction restricting airflow.

If the frame is sturdy it might survive mounting an electric motor with an off balance weight to vibrate, making it a one person job. Might need to add legs, possibly a chute.

I plan to add whatever I come up with in Search results | Farm Hack

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I found these sifter designs and the wheelbarrow one sounds like it’ll work for the amount I need to process.

Edit: I believe we have a winner.

Ultimate incarnation of the idea.

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Lol. We used to just use a grid and wooden frame and our hands. Great way to get your callouses regulated, your hands in the biome and super cheap.

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I found this on appropedia

I’ll take a look through a couple books later today to see if I find anything else interesting.

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Thank you for that resource.

The drum and vibe designs make a lot of sense for a larger volume. I might be able to get by with this basic sifter I built.

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My wife and I use basically the same manual method: screened wood frame on the wheelbarrow, gloved hands, push back and forth, shake up and down and side to side from time to time. We recite a simple ditty to help us shake up and down in unison; kinda silly but fun. :slight_smile: I wanted something easier and found several examples online. So I built a rotating drum sifter: a drum about the size of a 55 gallon drum but just three metal bands covered in 1/2" wire mesh. It had 3 internal ribs to help toss the stuff around. I put it on rollers with a hand crank. It sort of worked, but depending on the moisture of the compost, the tilt angle had to be varied and the drum probably needed to be about 6’ long to be thorough enough before the debris dropped off the end, although then we wouldn’t be able to catch it in a wheelbarrow. Also, too low an angle and stuff fell off the infeed side also. It was overkill and it was a pain in the neck. So I built a vibrating screen sifter using a very powerful concrete vibrator, suspended on springs, angled so debris would run off; just like the online stuff. It was a pain in the neck. Our compost is damp, not dry, and the vibrator had only marginal success at breaking it up. I even changed the vibrator’s counterweights to be twice as heavy as the original - to no real effect on the sifting although the vibrator sure shook like crazy… Looking back at the online videos, I saw very nice and very dry compost and in one case, compost that looked pre-sifted. We are back to humming the ditty and, really, it’s not all that much trouble. I think if you have a really significant volume, the drum approach would work but you’d want to experiment with size, length, angles, infeed, sifted material, and outfeed guides - the whole enchilada - to get a truly helpful system.

1 Like
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Thank you so much for sharing those attempts with the drum and vibe. I’m a little surprised they never became so useful as to be worth the trouble! You probably saved me a lot of trouble if I would have had the same conclusions.

I will try to get through it with the wheelbarrow screen method. My sifter sits neatly on top and I may enhance it with feet to keep it in place.

Here’s to keeping it simple.

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Think I’ll skip the motorized idea for now. Seems like more hassle than it’s worth from what everyone’s saying here. Manual method it is!