One year later… our Pela Lomi composter

It’s been about a year since our Pela Lomi countertop composter was delivered to our little Flagstaff apartment, pristinely wrapped in compostable bioplastic and recyclable cardboard/ paper tape.

…And, it’s been about a week since our replacement Pela Lomi was delivered to our Flagstaff apartment, wrapped in the same eco-friendly packaging.

Um. Yep.

I figured it was time for an update after a year with our Lomi composter.

Before I get into it, I just want to offer a disclaimer: This post is not sponsored in any way, shape or form. There are no affiliate links. I’m not a Lomi partner or anything. I’ve never received anything from Lomi for free, and I paid full retail price for my Lomi. This is just a genuine review from an apartment dweller who’s really passionate about sustainability and avoiding waste.

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DOES THE LOMI COMPOSTER WORK? HOW MUCH COMPOST DOES THE LOMI GENERATE?

To start: Ryan and I don’t eat meat, but we do eat a lot of produce — and even Yukon loves vegetables! It’s not uncommon for us to fill our Lomi up every other day, especially because I cook a lot from scratch. This sounds excessive, but I assure you, we really do eat that much produce.

We run our Lomi about three or four times a week. We usually fill it with coffee grounds and non-bleached filters, vegetable (carrot, potato, zucchini, onion, etc.) peels, stalks and ends, fruit (oranges, avocados, bananas, strawberries, etc.) peels, rinds, cores and skins, cheese rinds, nut and egg shells, spoiled leftovers (usually plant-based), the occasional seafood byproduct (like shrimp shells), compostable parchment paper and random compostable household waste, like cotton swabs.

So, I think it’s safe to say we’re heavy Lomi users, and we likely use ours more than most consumers.

It also didn’t take us long to generate a TON of compost! We filled an entire trash can in a six-month span, which quickly went into our raised bed garden. We ended up with a system. We would toss our scraps into our Lomi, run it, and then dump the finished product into a small bucket in our pantry. When the small bucket was full, we would transfer it to a trash can in our shed. When our trash can was full, we would dump it into our garden, etc. etc.

(Full disclaimer: We haven’t grown anything in the garden yet using the Lomi product.)

We generated roughly 20 gallons of compost using our Lomi over the past year!

It was amazing to be able to break down bioplastics (which I’d previously been throwing away, because we don’t have an industrial processing facility here) and to see a decrease in how often we take our trash out.

We recycle as much as we can here in Flagstaff, and while we do generate a bit more trash than normal due to what Flagstaff does (or rather, doesn’t) accept for recycling, we quickly realized we weren’t going through trash bags as much with our Lomi. I think we take our trash out maybe once a month now. And, since there’s not really any rotting food in our trash can, our trash can doesn’t smell too awful. It’s usually just full of trash that can’t be recycled (plastic yogurt tubs, oat milk cartons, plastic product packaging, takeout containers, etc).

HOWEVER… you can’t put everything in the Lomi. We have to throw away things like walnut shells and avocado pits. And even though Pela says that you can compost “soft nut shells” (the website specifically says that yes, you CAN compost pistachio shells)… we found that not everything breaks down well at all.

IS THE PELA LOMI COUNTERTOP COMPOSTER RELIABLE?

As much as I love our Lomi, during the first year we had it… it broke down and needed repairs. Three times.

First, the metal composting bucket broke. A metal piece of it completely sheared off, so we had to get a replacement bucket from Lomi (for free, thank you warranty!) before we could use it again.

Our Lomi was out of commission for three weeks while I worked to file a warranty claim and get a replacement bucket shipped. During that three weeks — which unfortunately included my birthday pumpkin-carving party — we collected our scraps in a large plastic bucket.

I can’t even convey how horrible it was to scoop moldy, rotting, three-week-old pumpkin guts out of that bucket and into the Lomi once we got our replacement bucket.

Then, three weeks later… the Lomi’s fan broke. We tried cleaning it with an air compressor, but ultimately, Lomi had to send us a replacement fan.

So…

Three more weeks of saving moldy, rotting, putrid scraps in a bucket.

Then, a few months after that, our Lomi stopped working yet again. I reached back out to customer service, and was told we had to ship our Lomi back for an entirely new unit.

Unfortunately, Lomi wanted us to use the unit’s original packaging to return ship, but we’d already recycled and composted it all.

So, we shipped it back in an Amazon box stuffed with all our film recycling as padding, and got a brand new Lomi about a month later. We skipped the putrid bucket this time, though. We just sucked it up and cut our losses and tossed our compostables into the trash. I couldn’t bring myself to sort through month-old rotting produce again. I’m sorry, Earth.

Luckily, all the replacement parts and return shipping were totally covered under our Lomi’s warranty…

Which brings me to…

LOMI’S WARRANTY AND CUSTOMER SERVICE

Both Lomi’s warranty and customer service are excellent.

Lomi representatives replied quickly both via email and on social media. They were great with diagnosing problems, walking me through possible solutions and never once tried to withhold repairs and parts from me.

Lomi’s warranty was also great. Like I said a few paragraphs above: It covered a replacement bucket (and shipping), a replacement fan (and shipping) and an entirely new replacement Lomi (and both return shipping for the old Lomi and shipping for the new Lomi).

At the end of our one-year warranty, I immediately spent $65 to extend our Lomi’s warranty for another two years due to all the problems we’ve had with our Lomi breaking down.

I highly, HIGHLY recommend buying the two-year Lomi extended warranty.

IS THE LOMI LOUD?

So, it’s funny. I wrote in my original initial post reviewing our Lomi that it was a little louder than we expected. Just a little, though.

Over the year we had our Lomi, apparently it progressively got louder. It was grinding and clunking 10 months into ownership, but we didn’t notice it getting progressively louder and louder until we had a friend over and we started it up for its “grow” cycle.

Our friend looked at us. “…Do you just, like, live with that sound?”

Um… apparently we do, yes? We explained that we usually run it overnight while we’re sleeping in the other so we don’t really notice it.

And apparently, we didn’t notice it getting progressively louder.

Then, when we got our replacement Lomi and plugged it in to run for the first time, we noticed how quiet it was compared to our old Lomi. No whirring, grinding, clunking or whining. Just a steady hum with an occasional clicking.

So, apparently the Lomi gets louder over time? Or our first unit was just defective.

Even when our old Lomi was at its loudest, it didn’t really bother us since our apartment is fairly spacious. We would typically run it while we were sleeping in the bedroom or working in the office, or when we weren’t at home. If you live in a studio apartment, however, it may be too loud to run while you’re sleeping or working from home.

HOW MUCH POWER DOES THE PELA LOMI USE?

I didn’t plug it into a voltmeter or anything to get accurate metrics, but I didn’t notice any drastic increase in our electric bill.

WOULD YOU BUY THE LOMI AGAIN? IS THE LOMI COMPOSTER WORTH IT?

This is a really tough question to answer.

When I first bought our Lomi, I justified the cost this way: We snagged it at a pretty great deal. Our Lomi was $300 new (a steal compared to the $500 it retails at now) with everything included: charcoal pellets, “LomiPods,” shipping, one-year warranty.

Now, we’ve invested about $400 in it, including the extended warranty. Lomi recommends replacing the charcoal filters once every 50 or so cycles (you don’t have to buy the Lomi brand pellets, you can buy charcoal pellets elsewhere for cheaper) and we didn’t order replacement “LomiPods.”

We used to pay $20 a month for green waste bucket pick-up, so we justified the cost of the Lomi by saying that once we hit 15 months with it, it would have been worth the investment.

Now that we’re $400 in, we need to hit 20 months… so almost two years before it “pays for itself.”

With the repairs and replacement parts its needed, I’m not sure if it would make it to that threshold without us purchasing the extended warranty.

And now, I’m terrified about what’s going to happen when we run out of extended warranty coverage. I’m really worried one of two things will happen. Either we’ll have to spend substantial amounts of money out of pocket for repairs and replacement parts (and shipping) or even an expensive Lomi replacement… or we’ll just have to throw this entire thing in the trash once it breaks.

So it’s really tough to say whether I would buy it again. I think that if you have the option to compost traditionally or if you live in a location that has a free or cheap green waste drop-off or pick-up option, definitely use that option over the Lomi! But if an electric composter like the Lomi is your only option for creating compost… it’s really hard to say whether it’s worth it.

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So, there’s our review of our Lomi, one year in! I’m hoping that our new Lomi doesn’t have the same issues and bugs as our first Lomi, and I’m optimistic that Lomi will work to remedy some of these problems. A little Googling tells me that some of our problems with the fan and the bucket seem to be fairly common… so I hope that these get addressed going forward so we can continue to use our Lomi without problems!

Update Oct. 9, 2024: Our replacement Lomi’s bucket broke, so we’ll be filing a warranty claim to get a new one. This is the first issue we’ve had after 19 months with our replacement Lomi.

This post was originally published March 29, 2023. It was last updated Oct. 9, 2024.