SandShrooms: June 2012

An exciting day! The three independent air systems arrived and are ready to be installed. I opted to try out the Stamets Air System II for all three grow rooms. Basically these systems control the high humidity and air exchange needed to flush the CO2 from the growing mushrooms. After emailing back and forth with a few folks, I'm going to set it up a bit differently to get a more accurate temp and humidity level in the rooms. The air is going to be brought to the correct temperature with swamp coolers out side of the grow rooms then it will be channeled via a duct to the blowers that forces air through a HEPA filter and into the grow rooms, there is also a Humidifan with a running water line that Atomizes the water droplets to humidify the room up to 100%...The change that I'm going to make is pretty simple. It is suggested to place the Humidistat in the ducting right after the conditioned air penetrates the HEPA filter...I'm going to instead put the Humidistat on the wall of the grow room, giving a better reading for the rooms humidity level. This is a common problem with this system and i believe it can be fixed by doing this. We will see!

The Laboratory is coming along quickly, everything is painted and sealed except for the floor. I'm going to open the pours of the concrete tomorrow with an acid and then seal it with a colored stain. I know there is no good way to paint and seal concrete so that it doesn't need to be painted constantly, but luckily there are no shoes allowed in the lab! Only Booties or clean socks because of the high amount of bacteria levels found on shoes...so i know the wear and tear on the sealant/stain will be minimal. If i had all the time in the world, id lay down linoleum but that ain't gonna happen this season! End of this week and next we will Install dust sealed lights and electrical outlets, build our laminar flow hood for sterile transfers, slanted grain jar shelving and finally bring in metal racks on wheels for our sterilized substrate to incubate on. The last step we are figuring out is what kind of initial air system to install. It has to maintain a constant temperature and be filtered through an electrostatic filter and be able to do hourly air exchanges. We are thinking an air recuperation that saves on heating and cooling coasts by using the recirculating air to equalize the temperature of the incoming air without the streams ever coming in contact with one another. The Laminar Flow Hood will recycle the electrostatic filtered air already in the lab's positive pressure environment, thus lengthening the life of the costly HEPA filters that are part of the Laminar Flow Hood.

I'm really hoping to have grain spawn incubating by the beginning of the month, this way we will have the time to finish up the growing rooms air systems and build out custom 55 gallon drum Autoclaves for steam sterilizing the substrate!

YES!