Compost activators are great!
I use activators often to help accelerate my compost pile. Does your compost pile need one? You can gauge this by how long it takes your compost pile to shrink. With warm weather, adequate oxygen and a good mix of nitrogen and carbon items, your compost pile should sink considerably as it turns to humus. If it doesn't, it might need a compost starter, an activator.
When
building a compost pile, the goal is to balance
carbon items with nitrogen items. Nitrogen is
needed as fuel by the microorganisms as they
break things down. If you have enough nitrogen
items in your pile, you don’t need to add
nitrogen. However, if you don’t have enough
nitrogen, the pile won’t heat up, and will take
forever to turn to humus.
I usually have more dry carbon items to compost than I do green nitrogen items. When this happens, I add nitrogen as a compost accelerator. Adding in a shovel full of aged chicken litter, horse, goat or cow manure will really help to heat up a compost pile. Bedding materials from rabbits, horses and goats contain both urine and feces, and will also help speed things up.
Some sources of nitrogen are:
This last one might surprise you. If you can get over the “yuck” factor, human urine actually isn't a bad choice. It's free, sterile when secreted, has very little odor if used within 24 hours, is quite available, and works great. This in the form of nitrogen I use to inoculate my compost pile. It's quite easy to keep a 2 quart juice container in the bathroom so that, as needed, I can empty it each day onto my compost pile.
Microbes are the organisms that do the decomposing. Without them, nothing happens. Fortunately, getting microbes shouldn't be a problem, since they are readily available: