How To Make A Compost Tea Brewer For Under $100

Please watch the video tutorial to show you how to make a Compost Tea Brewer for under $100

All the items that are available from your local hardware store, such as Bunnings. The air pump, we actually purchased this from eBay, this was $33. Now, when you're buying your pump, you really need to match it to the size of your bucket. So we're using a 20 liter plastic bucket, and this is rated at 20 liters a minute. So that's a very good combination. The other thing you will need to purchase from us is the all-important teabag. Now, these are specially made for us. It's a polypropylene mesh, which is a 400-micron hole. That hole is very specific to making compost tea, because when you put your compost into the bag, the 400-micron mesh allows the bacteria to come out of the bag and your compost stays inside the bag.

All the other parts we got from Bunnings. We got a meter length of 15mm PVC polypipe, and cut it into sections basically drilled some holes in the polypipe for the aeration. So there's about 50 holes we drilled in this with a 3mm drill bit.
Then we've got three elbows. You will need a barb fitting with a 15 BSP thread size and an 8mm barb. Probably the best place to get that is on eBay, same as the pump.

So all these items together cost less than a hundred Australian dollars and very simple to make. All we've done with the bucket is in the lid we've drilled a 20mm hole. So I'll just quickly assemble this brewer to show you how easy it is to assemble. So this fitting goes in the underneath of the lid. Then we've got this irrigation fitting that screws on there. Then your 8mm barb fitting that we're going to connect the air pump to just easily screws onto here. Now your teabag, this fits into the hole. You will have to drill a hole into your bucket. We've got all the hole sizes on the instruction sheets on our website. So that just fits in nicely into the hole. That's a nice sealed unit. Then the fittings we've used are just a push-fit. You don't want screw fittings because you need to easily disassemble this when you finish making your brew so you can clean all your pipework.

So I'll just quickly assemble this. There's no strict rules on how to assemble these and how to make your polypipe fittings. You can make your own construction, but this is the one that I have designed here. So that just fits on the bottom of the lid. So that's your assembled brewer. Then we've got a piece of 8mm internal diameter tube. You might have that lying around in your house or in your shed. That should connect to the pump.

Now it's really very important and what you have to remember is with your brewer, your pump must always be above the bucket because if it's beneath the waterline, when you turn the pump off, it will backflow into your pump. And I'm just going to plug this in. So that's the brewer assembled and working.