Autoclave Sterilization for Mushroom Spawn
So this is the autoclave that connects into the newer lab, so this will be used to sterilize grain spawn. And yeah, it's a horizontal autoclave, so this is the dirty end. You can load your materials right here. So in this case, we have some spawn, and it just sits right in these baskets like that, and then we'll just slide it in and basically keep doing that until it's full.
And this is the door, so I'll just set this in [Music]. And yeah, it locks on really good. It's a really high pressures in here, so you don't want any steam escaping and getting any burns. I'll tighten that up. And what I found with with the one out with this autoclave, so you want to make sure that it's really tight. So that's it.
Written protocol
Commercial Cultivation SOP Playbook
The written protocols behind this process, as run on the farm.
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So once it's, uh, once it's loaded, I'll come over here, turn it on, and then basically just switch it on. And then when it gets to the proper pressure, I can set the heaters to work. The second set of heaters will go to work. The pressure gauge is up here. It'll get to 15 or about 20 psi. Once it's 20 psi, the it's hooked up to a sensor, so the heating element shuts off. It cools down to 15 psi, then it automatically kicks back on. So the whole sterilization process, you're cooking between 15 to 20 psi, and, uh, yeah, it works really well.
I actually got really lucky with this, um, and some an old grower was kind of getting rid of it, so I got this and a lot of some other equipment for under a thousand bucks. So really just the work was just setting it up, getting it hooked up to Electricity, stuff like that. But yeah, really, really excited to actually have an autoclave. Just as a kid, this is one of those things that I didn't ever think that I'd be able to get or, you know, just seem so far out of reach. But now that it's here, I feel really happy.
So after sterilization is complete and we're ready to unload it, it actually gets unloaded in the laboratory. There's another door just like this that's built into the wall of the lab, so I can open it up and pull the spawn out directly into a clean clean room, so they, the spawn is as clean as possible. At that point, it can be inoculated, moved on to production. So with, uh, pressure sterilization, you're able to sterilize much more efficiently. You can reach temperatures that you can't get to normally at atmospheric levels, so In this sterilizer, we can get to temperatures around 250 to 270 degrees during the sterilization process, and without the pressure, we're usually at around 212 degrees. So this will sterilize spawn in a matter of four hours compared to 20 hours, so it's one-fifth of the sterilization time, and it's just much more efficient. You can, it's kind of like an insurance policy or whatnot. You just really feel safe about using the spawn. I do like atmospheric sterilization of spawn, but it works really well when you can do pressure sterilization, inoculate the grain spawn, and then utilize that as a generation one, and then inoculate that into generation two bags. So let's say I do like a round of 80 spawn bags in this autoclave. We can turn that into 800 bags of spawn within six weeks, so it really works well from my process, you.