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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer *UPDATE* * 4
    #27221241 - 02/22/21 10:48 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Off-Grid Sterilizer

What's up everybody welcome to my thread. So I just finished (or mostly finished) building a propane powered bulk sterilizer. I modeled mine after RR's build but it's slightly different and a little more simple and inexpensive since I used a lot of items I had lying around.

For those who don't know, an atmospheric sterilizer uses boiling water to create steam which flows over bags of sub or grain to sterilize them. Since it is done at atmospheric pressures, it takes considerably longer to sterilize than a pc. I intend to run mine for 24hrs per run.

Some sterilizers are single barrel (like bubbas barrels) but the one I will be detailing today is a double barrel boiler type steamer.

Without further ado....

So back when I had electricity from the grid I had built a DIY single barrel sterilizer out of a plastic 55gal drum. For this build I will be recycling that drum to act as the sterilization chamber. More on that later

For the boiler I picked up this 55gal sealed lid barrel for free on craigslist. It had some gunk in it so I cleaned it out and rinsed it as best I could


First off I drilled two 1/2 inch holes, one at the bottom and one 3/4 of the way up above the 1st hole to put in a sight glass in order to monitor water level. This system will not be on a float and will need to be filled with water manually.

For the sight glass I used two 1/2 inch street elbows and a piece of poly tubing. A street elbow is a 90 degree fitting with male threading on one end and female threading on the other


Now I'm not a welder so as you can see I used jb weld to attach the street elbows to the drum. It worked just fine and the seal it makes is water tight. If you know how to weld, good for you :lol:

Into each female end I screwed in a male adapter. Now fit the poly tubing over the male adapter on one end and then fasten it with a tube clamp. Do the same with the other end of the poly tubing to make a sight glass that runs between each elbow like so

Now you can monitor the amount of water in the barrel at all times.

Next I installed the drain fixture

Again jb weld worked just fine to fix the spigot to the drum.

Now this is the stand I made from an old shelving unit. The boiler will sit on the two steel pipes with the burner underneath it, and the steamer vessel will sit above that horizontally on the shelf.


Now speakong of the steamer vessel. I will be making it by reusing my old electric sterilizer drum


Here you can have a look inside at the heating element and float that used to power this single barrel sterilizer


I removed all that shit and siliconed the hole where the float was. The hole for the element will be where I have the steam piped in from the boiler


I used copper pipe as my steam delivery system, I used 3/4 inch pipe which fit the small bung hole perfectly. First time sweating copper so dont laugh at my noobishness:lol:

Ball valve to control the flow of steam.

A hole was drilled into the shelf to run the pipe through. A 1" screw adapter attaches the pipe to the vessel


On the inside, a 90 degree elbow faces the opening of the vessel. This is where the steam will come into the barrel


Like I said before, this is a manual fill unit. I fill it through the main 2" bung hole using this special funnel I made and a 5 gallon water jug


10 gallons of collected snow melt fills it half way up the bottom 1/3rd of the boiler. Check the sight glass
:grin:

Alright so the unit sits 10" off the ground which is perfect to slide my 8" tall burner under


I fired her up to see if it steams and voila! She works!


Took a minute to reach a full boil but thats ok. Will be insulating pipe and the boiler and what not here in the next couple days.

The 2nd post will be how I prep sawdust bags and the maiden voyage for this unit. Stick around!


--------------------


Edited by natedawgnow (03/04/21 10:43 AM)


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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27221244 - 02/22/21 10:49 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE

What's up OMC! So the other day I put the unit through its 1st run and I'm pleased with the results!

I thought I'd show how I prep bags for this unit (sawdust in this example but any sub really) and some details about the 1st run, things I learned, and things I'd do slightly different.

Anyway here we go

I start by acquiring hardwood sawdust. Usually most people (self included) use hardwood fuel pellets used for pellet stoves and such. If that isn't something you can usually get in your area, the kimd meant for bbq may be substituted, but at a higher cost.

Well I live surrounded by a pine forest so HWFP are hard to find. But I found these at ace for very cheap


They are basically like coir bricks but HW sawdust instead.


Each bail of 6 bricks weighs 20lbs and it was like 6 bucks for 3 bails or something stupid like that.

So For my gourmets I usually try to prep my sub with a 55% water content by weight with a 5% bran supp by weight of dry ingredients only.

For this run I am making 100lbs of sub, or 40x 2.5lb bags. These are for reishi, if I was doing shiitake, lionsmane, etc I would make each bag 5lb for a total of 20 bags.

So, 100lbs of sub with a 55% water content is 55lbs water to 45lbs dry substrate. First weigh out your water. A 5gal bucket of water is 40lbs. I do 1 and a 1/3 buckets of water for this prep.

Now weigh out dry ingredients. I need 45lbs total of dry ingredients. Since bran is supped at 5%, I need 42.75lbs of sawdust to 2.25lbs of bran for this mix. It doesnt need to be exact exact but as close as possible.

As you can see, 2 bales plus 1 brick is a tad over for the sawdust


I added the blocks plus the water into a horse water trough to be mixed. Then after it's all mixed and expanded, I add the bran

Mix it up really well. It helps to have a nice view


Sawdust is prepped below field capacity so a squeeze test shouldnt produce any trickles at all. Maybe some welling up between the fingers at most.

Here is the mix after it's all expanded and bran is mixed in

You can see that this stuff has quite a few chunks and pokey pieces. I'm interested to see how this works compared to HWFP which are small particle sawdust. Be careful not to puncture your bags with sharp splinters if you use these blocks though!

Ok now I bag up all the sawdust, squeeze as much air as I can out and form it into a tight uniform block and seal the openings. Bags are then rolled filter facing in to be loaded and sterilized

It's packed with gaps so steam can flow ober each bag.

Fire up the burner and let the boiler vent by opening the main bung hole and closing the ball valbe to the chamber for as long as it takes to reach a full boil. Just like with a pc you want to purge all the air from the boiler.

Once you've vented the boiler, close the bung hole and open the ball valve to the chamber and purge the chamber for 30min. You want the chamber to be filled with only steam as well.

After 30 min you can see water vapor pouring out of the top hole on the chamber

Now I put the plug in the vent hole and lightly screw it in so that it doesnt seal. It will still allow steam to flow out of the hole but at a slower rate.

After a few hours I took a temp reading

Since water boils around 195f at my elevation, I am pretty pleased with that reading :grin:

Unit is ran for 24 hours.

After the run, bags are allowed to cool then loaded up, taken out to the hood house, and inoculated. I have 10 jars and each jar goes to 4 bags.



ISSUES AND COMPLAINTS
So I did have a small leak in one of the copper connections, but I resweat it and it's fixed now. Always check your stuff before your run to avoid catastrophe. It was a small leak, like 1 drop every couple seconds.

Also, I may need to install a drain into the chamber because a small pool of water did form inside. Very little but still.

Here's a good hint too: get a nice burner. Like 150,000btu minimum. My little 40,000btu unit took a long ass time to bring the drum to a full boil. Trust me splurge on a nice unit for this.

Lastly, when i opened the unit after cooldown, 2 bags fell out. They must have shifted during the cook. They both landed on the cinder block and tore a bit so be very careful when you go to open your units!

Well, I'll update after they start to antler so you can see that it works. Thanks for following along everyone!



Edited by natedawgnow (03/04/21 10:42 AM)


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OfflineLand TroutM
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27221278 - 02/22/21 11:15 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Bookmarking this


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Invisiblefilthyknees
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: Land Trout]
    #27224495 - 02/24/21 05:37 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Diy :cool:


--------------------
But if you're in a hurry, and really got to go
If you're in a hurry, might have to find out slow
That it's one thing to try and another to fly
You get there quicker just a step at a time
It's one thing to bark, another to bite
The show ain't over till you pack up at night


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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: filthyknees]
    #27224522 - 02/24/21 05:52 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Yessir. DIY all the way! I will be making it fancier in the future though.

Bare bones right now but i'd like it to have another sterilization vessel up top.
It's in my big garage/workroom in which I will be building a full grow room
and I'd like to be able to pipe the steam into the grow room for warmth and humidity
like rr does in his build. So I'll be redoing the piping and adding a 2nd boiler
once I got the fruiting room built. Gonna start on that here soon and ill post about it when I do


--------------------


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Invisiblefilthyknees
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27224536 - 02/24/21 06:03 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

I feel that. I was reading drake's shed thread with sauna steamers yesterday realizing I'm playing in the kiddie pool lol.

Can't wait to see more, I pray you have no leaks.


--------------------
But if you're in a hurry, and really got to go
If you're in a hurry, might have to find out slow
That it's one thing to try and another to fly
You get there quicker just a step at a time
It's one thing to bark, another to bite
The show ain't over till you pack up at night


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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: filthyknees]
    #27224600 - 02/24/21 06:34 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

So far so good. I ran it for a few hours with nothing in it the other day and
I didnt observe any leaks so that made me happy haha.

I may try to make it low pressure in the future, like 3psi max, but I dont know how well the plastic barrel will hold up


--------------------


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OfflineLand TroutM
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27224603 - 02/24/21 06:34 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Dog, did you have to modify that barrel to make the lid?  Seems like the ones I see always have a lid that’s pressed in or something.


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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: Land Trout]
    #27224608 - 02/24/21 06:38 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

The black boiler barrel has a sealed lid with 2 bung holes, just a standard drum.

The plastic one is food grade with a removable lid and lid clamp. Neither lid was modified in anyway.

I used a 3/4" screw to pipe adapter which screwed into the 3/4" bung hole on the boiler perfectly.

You can see it in the pic with the piping in the op.


--------------------


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InvisibleCOLDLOGIC
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27224665 - 02/24/21 07:31 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

This is the kind of post that makes me happy to log in and just sift through and see DIY projects. Good job!  This old head loves it!


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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: COLDLOGIC]
    #27225507 - 02/25/21 08:22 AM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Thanks man! Hopefully today I'll be prepping sawdust bags to be sterilized :rockon:

May try to run a grain bag or 2 as a test also.


--------------------


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OfflineNichrome
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27232030 - 03/01/21 12:27 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Rad. Building 3 of these next month. :hatsoff:


--------------------
Better to be deprived of food for three days, than tea for one.


Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should. ~Emerson


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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: Nichrome]
    #27232084 - 03/01/21 01:05 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Dope 3 seperate units or 1 boiler 3 chambers?


--------------------


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OfflineNichrome
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27232163 - 03/01/21 02:12 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

3 units.


--------------------
Better to be deprived of food for three days, than tea for one.


Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should. ~Emerson


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InvisiblezMan
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: Nichrome]
    #27232237 - 03/01/21 03:13 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

That's awesome. I pondered building one but I have no room and don't feel much like keeping it outside in the wide open with no roof over it.

How much water do you have to keep in there? I'm assuming adding to much cold water would mess up the cycle


--------------------
Information for everyone: http://www.mushroomvideos.com
Are your grains or spawn clean? CLICK THIS CHECKLIST


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InvisibleFriedEggS
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: zMan]
    #27233012 - 03/02/21 01:13 AM (2 years, 10 months ago)

:bowdown: bookmarked for later


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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: FriedEgg]
    #27233116 - 03/02/21 04:12 AM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Awesome redneck engineering. I love how you reused so much of what you already had:thumbup:


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Invisiblealaskappalachian
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: Dirkfrangle1]
    #27233139 - 03/02/21 04:47 AM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Fuck... I just realized I had two 55gal plastic barrels  out back I haven't cut up for vertical planters yet.  Makes me want to chip them out from under the ice/snow pile and clear out my shed...  Appreciate this writeup Nate :rockon: 


--------------------


"First we build the tools, then they build us."

THE 49th MYCOJOURNAL: Exotics, Auroras, and Entities


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Invisiblenatedawgnow
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: zMan]
    #27233261 - 03/02/21 07:41 AM (2 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

zMan said:
That's awesome. I pondered building one but I have no room and don't feel much like keeping it outside in the wide open with no roof over it.

How much water do you have to keep in there? I'm assuming adding to much cold water would mess up the cycle



I put 12 or so gallons in it yesterday and it still has plenty of water left.

i had to stop the run yesterday to take my doggo to the vet so it wont be done
til tonight now but I will update once the cycle is over.

Tip: get a nice burner capable of at least 100,000 btu. The one I have is only 40,000 btu
and it took WAY TOO LONG to get to a rolling boil yesterday. Like an hour at least on full blast

Gonna get myself a nicer burner for the next run


--------------------


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OfflineNichrome
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Re: Mushrooms on the mountain: bulk off grid steam sterilizer [Re: natedawgnow]
    #27233603 - 03/02/21 12:24 PM (2 years, 10 months ago)

My burners are 400k. I don't want to wait around. I initially got them for pasteurizing sub but I'm sure I can use them for both.

Do you think there would be any issue with using a steel drum for both?


--------------------
Better to be deprived of food for three days, than tea for one.


Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should. ~Emerson


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