Soooooo, I had a little oops yesterday when I emptied the ash bucket into the compost bins. As you normally do, but it appears that some of it might have been still aglow. It was about a week's worth, and it needed emptying, so I didn't think too much of it and just dumped it in the compost and wandered off.
And this is what my husband found when he went outside this morning - two bins completely destroyed and my hot compost pile reduced to nothing! It certainly got hot enough, briefly, before it burned down. The most damage is near the rubber mat I was using to hold the heat in, rather than near the ash, so we're thinking a coal got too near the rubber and it caught alight.
Absolutely reduced to nothing, the leaves have completely burnt down. As a reminder, this is what it looked like last week.
The little compost tumbler to the right is reduced to a few bits of steel; the rubber mat is a smouldering shadow of its former self and one of my brand new weed tea buckets has melted. Not completely though, just around the lid, and the weed tea is actually looking pretty good.
Anyway, another learning experience. It was directly under several very old and very flammable pine trees, and about three metres away from our garage, with all our stuff including our brand new car. We are going to take the opportunity to relocate the compost bins and build new ones, and I've already got a larger ash bucket that all ashes are going into from now on for AT LEAST a week before they go on the compost.
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