This article addresses the situation where your facility shuts down for a week or more and you won’t be using your LFC biodigester during that time.

Firstly, you should never turn off your LFC biodigester. Even though you may not have added waste food for some time, it still has organic matter in the drum and that still needs to be digested. This matter comprises waste such as onion skins and pineapple heads that are hard, and slow, to digest. Some of this matter may take many weeks to be fully digested.

Here is an image of a screen shot from the LFC Cloud of an LFC biodigester that was left to run down for a month:

Even at the end of four weeks, there was still material in the drum being digested.

If you are leaving your LFC biodigester for some time, leave it powered on and ensure you continue to supply warm water to the machine.

The software on your machine will take care of the situation. After some time, your LFC biodigester will operate in a less active mode to use less water and less electricity.

The software transitions to the inactive state some time after you have not opened the door and when the amount of waste remaining in the LFC biodigester is low. These parameters are 30 hours and 5% of nominal capacity, but you can adjust them easily from the Automatic Program screen.

The bottom line is you don’t need to do anything. Leave your machine turned on and turn off the lights!

If you don’t use the LFC biodigester for several weeks, you may need to supplement the microorganisms on your return. Without food, the microorganisms may die. We usually say that the microbes will live for ten days without new food, but we have customers who have not fed the machine with waste for three weeks and have returned and have been able to use the machine without adding new Powerzyme.

If you visit your facility during the shutdown, and have the opportunity to add some waste, try to keep the waste as a balanced diet.

Upon restarting the machine, feed the machine gradually, such as with an additional quarter of the nominal capacity each day. This will allow the microorganisms greater possibility of multiplying. If the food isn’t being digested, order new Powerzyme from your authorized distributor or from Power Knot directly.