I balked at the price of a good compost thermometer but have always been curious as to how hot my pile was getting. So, I got to thinking. Which often gets me in trouble. But this time, I think I may have hit on a decent idea.
I bought an inexpensive wireless indoor/outdoor thermometer from Amazon,
and I put the outside sensor into a number of used ziplock bags. 
Then I just put it into the pile under the most recent addition.
Which in the interest of good taste shall remain unidentified.
It works as well as I had hoped. It got over 130 Fahrenheit after this addition.
I don’t even have to go outside to check!
The only downside that I can think of is that I can’t get readings from different areas of the pile. But just knowing that it’s cooking is the main thing. Plus changing the batteries might be a bit of a pain. But I haven’t had to do that yet.
That's a great idea! We gave up on the hot compost thing years ago. Just couldn't get the carbon/nitrogen balance right. Now all the kitchen compost just gets tossed in a in a bin. The garden gets compost out of the goat barn. It comes with the perfect brown/green ratio since the goats waste so much of their hay. If we had a tractor we would turn the pile to make it compost faster, but we just let it sit all winter and it's pretty much ready to use by the time we need it.
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There is a certain product that is pretty much guaranteed to get hot and it is important for that ingredient to get hot in order to kill the bad bacteria.
Hint, it’s named in the tags.
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I read between the lines! Haha!
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Love the idea! I'd really like to see your humanure system too! No shame in talking about such things, it's inspiring. I'm hesitant because of the obvious cultural phobias, but a system using a bucket automatically looks and sounds much less intimidating than fancy methods.
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It is a very simple system that is based on the Joe Jenkins “Lovable Loo “. I’ve been using it for well over a decade now. I think I still have a copy of Joe’s book in digital form that I could probably share if anyone is interested.
I purchased a “privy kit (http://www.ecovita.net/privy501.html), built a wooden box and added a little 12v computer fan that runs on solar which causes it to be odorless while in use . That’s pretty much it.
Being the only one to use it, (my wife is still fecophobic), it takes me two weeks to fill it. I use a disc of newspaper and a lot of sawdust after each use. Sometimes I add powdered biochar to the sawdust. But that makes it a bit dusty. Alright for the man cave where I have mine, but probably too messy for in-house use.
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