Perlite Data

I thought THIS was something that would be of interest to people contemplating mushroom cultivation using the perlite method. It is a printout from a humidity/temp gauge, that I borrowed from the lab I work at. it is an expensive and accurate piece of equipment called a "hamster" and it records temp and humidity at preset intervals (30 sec, 1min, 1 hr) and stores these data points which are later read by a computer.

I placed the hamster in a well sealed styrofoam cooler that had about 2" of perlite in the bottom and was filled with a weak H2O + H₂O₂ solution. the water solution was added until all the perlite had soaked it up and there was no standing water pools under the perlite. the hamster itself is approximately 4.5" long so the readings are for the air 4.5" above the perlite layer. When you look at the graph you can see that the hamster was placed in the cooler at about 1am on dec 4th and was not removed till after 9am the next day. the amazing thing is the humidity was way over 90%. However, it is my belief that the hamster is less accurate in the extreme humidity range, so I don't think that the humidity was really the 97% that appears on the graph but I would say it was at least 90%. There were NO cakes in this cooler, but I intend to take more measurements with this thing once i have some cakes to see if there is a difference. If all works well I intend to share that data with everyone as well.