Easy and cheap Fridge Incubator TEK - Mushroom Cultivation

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Colonel Kurtz Ph.D
What What?

Registered: 07/22/04
Posts: 11,113
Loc: Shadow Moses

Easy and cheap Fridge Incubator TEK

#3766045 - 02/11/05 09:54 AM (20 years, 11 months ago)

This is for you all thinking about getting a nice fridge incubator but don't know what to do.

This is my first TEK writing, so bear with me :tongue:

To be updated tonight, I'm in a hurry right now:

<---Fridge's TEK----->

So let's get at it:

THIS is my fridge. It's an usual fridge, nothing especial about it, it's just old, and the temperatures here are so low that if I want something cold I just put it in the window for 20 minutes and voila! Cold beer. So, let's unplug it and make a cool-ass incubator out of it!!!

So I just emptied of food, and took anything inside it out:

Now, you might be thinking it's not that big. It's not. BUT take into account we're putting here 500cc jars! There is place for a LOT of jar s there. As you can see, it's dirty as hell, and we have some moldy friends here:

As you know, we can't let this little fellows come near our soon to be little mushrooms, so I cleaned it all with some water. We want to be really clean right?

Now you can see it clean, without molds of any kind right?

WRONG. There are lots of molds in every corner of it, so we want to clean it all another time, this time with this:

So why the bleach now you may ask? As you may know, molds reproduce by spores, some microscopic kind of seeds. We don't want this spores to come near our mushroom's food, so we may as well kill 'em. Bleach will accomplish this. So what next? THIS:

Clean every little space with a water and bleach mix, clean it all, don't be afraid of being too clean :grin:

Now it's all disinfected we want to put something inside it to heat it. In my personal experience humid heat is better so I just put the containers we left out before inside the fridge again (Of course all of them cleaned with water+bleach!!) and fill the lower one with water:

Notice how clean everything is.

Now, this water's porpoise is to be heated by this:

In this case, a 25w aquarium heater, available at any pet store for less than 20?.

So you might ask, why put it at the bottom of the fridge? Well, because when water gets hot it evaporates and goes UP. And we want our jars to be warm, up in the fridge.

So we put the heater inside the water, following the instructions:

ALL of it must be submerged!!! If not it might just explode or burn.
I put a tiny digital thermometer inside the water to make sure the heater is working right. (You'll have to experiment with the volume of water, wattage of your heater and other conditions to archive the proper temperature inside the incubator; In my case when the water gets to 34c? the incubator's inside is at 27c?, just perfect.)

Now, we want to have another thermometer inside the incubator so as we know what temperature is inside there. I bought an hygrometer and put the "outside" thermometer inside such as this:

Put it the place were you plan to put your jars.

Now we need to take those cords outside the fridge/incubator, so sadly, our until now completely isolation will be not so good.

Now, remember high school? When water gets hot it warms the air surrounding it, which goes UP. This is the air which will warm our jars.
So, if warm air goes UP, and we don't want to loose this air, we must put the cords in such a way the go outside the fridge from it's bottom. Such as this:

The cords will go underneath the isolation plastic in the fridge's door.

But before we close the fridge let's put a little bleach in the water, so it doesn't grow any kind of malevolent mold or bacteria.

Ok, we're almost done. Just close the fridge's door, holding the cords in one hand so they don't move (You may put some kind of tape there also).

So now it's closed. Just plug the heater, turn on the hygrometer and voila!!! Your own incubator!! All in all, it costed me less than 30?, and it can hold up to 40 jars if managed properly. You just need to find a fridge, or use your own if you can.
The heater will maintain temperature constant:

(The temperature inside the incubator is the one at the top of the hygrometer)

And the water will keep humidity levels right.

It was easy, wasn't it? Now, put your jars inside it and let 'em grow!! Every time you open the incubator you lose the warm air, so it could take up to an hour to heat everything up again, but don't worry, it won't hurt your fungi friends too much. Just don't open it every 5 minutes, k?

Be safe, have fun!

<-----Fridge's TEK--->

That's it for now, enjoy it :laugh:

Edited by Deepman (02/11/05 03:43 PM)

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