Scaling a Small Mushroom Farm: The Problems Nobody Warns You About

0:08 I am the my corupt inoculator I out spread yeah all consuming sacri power growing as the grounds reached ring never as the well okay so this episode's going to be called uh cluster cluck and it's it actually like this is a a preemptive into incubation this is like the the intro to incubation yeah and we'll talk about I'm sure a lot of the examples will be related to that and related to freeding okay so start at this could be interesting actually ex he this is like okay so before we actually get crazy into this his his like pull towards wanting to do this bizarre setup was the fact that like he really thought he could just incubate racks within um sort of a Milk Barn environment that was his lab which I was like no he just very uh fixed on the notion that that space yeah had to be the space for it's got to be the space it's the only thing that works the only thing I have right and it's like no that's not it whatsoever yeah so yeah what's up hey if you're coming in and out you want to go out that way so I don't have tons of sound oh yeah yeah yeah he doesn't care um it's Eric's house husband yeah well what are you gonna do you don't know me um all right I'll put I'm going to lay out the scenario let's put it this way okay and then we'll start talking about the issues with it right right cuz it's a good example like across the board yeah yeah yeah so yeah I don't know what we'll call this and we can try to bounce between uh examples that are kind of like the full continuity of cultivation I'm sure we can pull up things across the board that we see periodically especially with that steaming to yeah air flow Fring yada y yeah yeah this is the micro problem oh my God that's the name of this episode it's the micro problem how many times do people come with small spaces in mind and they're like how much can I do in this space Oh yeah yeah yeah and then also yeah upstart new Farms with uh a lot of zeal a lot of enthusiasm not a lot of space like I need 10,000 blocks that's true I need 10,000 now so micro problems can have to do with your tiny Fring or your tiny production scenario or I'm just going to say it micro doing is so don't do hard drugs well and just like uh human nature especially in the context where you have limited resources and money and all that and a lot of things to think about yeah but just like human behavior in general you're always consciously you're not looking for ways to cut Corners save time it's just like it's just Tendencies and so that applies at the bigger scale to how people try to design their farm and run their Farm yeah I have to peel back sometimes I'll be totally analyzed by certain people on consultations where they're like uh what would they say okay Eric like I'm not coming at this with $100,000 and I'm like I understand that but at the same time you have to understand what it is idealistically and then work back from there because if you don't you're going to up and you're just going to perpetually be like fighting uphill battle to try and like convince yourself what you're doing is correct yeah and then like I was saying the other day is like the bias should be instead of the bias being how can I how many corners can I cut to get this thing going yeah it should be the other way around and you should have to like force yourself to justify yeah thoroughly any Corners that you cut totally and we all will oh yeah yeah you know yeah cutting Corners is key but all right so a good start with this is an example of a consultation I did without mentioning who it is let's just lay out the footprint so the space that they have I think it was like 100 square feet

5:08 something like that it's not very big right there's a number of problems with the space given that it's old um it's extremely just dirty concrete um the actual structure structure is something like this from the outside um with a front door sort of entrance and then in the midle middle of the room there's like this hatch I don't know if it was like originally like a uh ever push somebody's hair out of the way and go that's not my hair yeah all the time yeah gross so old building uh kind of has this attic concept and they want to do production in here and it's an old Milk Bar it's old Milk Bar yeah there's Windows on this side windows on this side and a single door entrance and it's groy it's nasty as from above Bird's eyee view so in the center in the top I'll get rid of this but here's like this hatch right so this comes down from like the ceiling area the actual floor plan is this door opens and there's this like large milk concrete T conr tub yeah and there's a window there 's a window here and conceptually how do you make use of a 100 squ foot space like this like it's really small and they want to do block production in here so ideally they'd put a lean two on the outside and they'd have like a you know fener bagger system over here and some pellets of pallets of pellets and blah blah and they want to utilize this in some way that makes a ton of sense and they just perpetually I think want to try and find the cheapest and easiest way to prove a concept if you try and find dumb cheap way to prove a concept you're going to end up with a lot of issues um so we kind of March through a lot of them but I never know if they stick with people what and uh for these folks what was like the scale of how many blocks did they want to make yeah so I think they're in the Bubba Barrel land so basically you've got you know one bubble barrel uh of the size that they got probably does 80 blocks 801b blocks I think that's as many as they can do so I proposed this issue that was like if you have a Bubba barrel and you're trying to cool an area for a lab as well as keep it filtered you really need to separate those two areas so you need to seal all the concrete you need to like put core plast up and down all the walls on the inside you know make it nice and airtight and I said If you're trying to steam in one side of this and then trying to cool and filter in the other side you're like playing with too many different um weather elements if you will and they were like well because they wanted to incubate in here as well so I was like the only way to do that is really to like create a really nice cooling AC system in one side and then sort of block off this entire area um and just have it Escape out the building so like all the steam you're building up just goes away but I was like honestly like you're going to have a huge heat sink of a wall right here yep and you're gonna you know tighten your space even more and if you want to incubate in there as well as do production in there it's going to be so tight and you're going to have temperature issues especially when you pull hot blocks across here they're coming out at 200 Fahrenheit right so you're pulling 200 degree blocks out of here and then you're incubating block temperatures Skyrock yeah you're right off the bat right even before moving ahead to other things with this yeah not only is a heat sink on this side but then temporarily during cooling it's a heat sink on both sides right and you know uh yeah if you're trying to have that like temperature controlled environment having it just be directly exposed and flush yeah with some kind of unregulated environment where you're constantly fighting against that heat even with crazy systems in place it's a major uphill battle to try to keep that space at the temp that you're after yeah it's an insane battle and I think you can't combine incubation in a lab in the same way I think people would really like to I think they see them as the same sterile clean space but the reality is this right this is how they want to lay this out um they have this hot area with this concrete bath above a barrel basically sitting inside of this thing which is adorable and uh uh a drain in the center of the space so what their

10:08 ideal is is like let's have a HEPA filter uh station you know where we can knock and seal our bags so there an old floor drain right there yeah and we also want to incubate in here so let's say this is incubation uh racks yeah so it presents a number problems just like we're talking about right you create a ton of heat you have to pull these blocks out hot so that you're not contaminating the blocks inside of the bubble Barrel so how do you get them from the bubble Barrel into a clean HEPA filtered environment without upsetting incubation blocks right because all of a sudden this room goes from like a beautiful regulated AC assuming there's an AC up here um of like 66 to all of a sudden it's 150 degrees in there if not higher or hotter um that will upset your incubation like nobody's business this might sound obvious but it wasn't obvious it comes up it comes up pretty often yeah because you forget the fact that like you're dealing with these extreme temperatures and incubating blocks just don't take kindly to that it's the only thing that really uh demands consistent temperatures in this whole process yeah and then another thing right there uh even in the scenario where this whole building is rehabbed and that clean space is genuinely clean right and looks great yep um you're still going to get contaminated blocks and what happens when you have blocks that have a bunch of neurospora on them sitting literally a couple feet away from blocks that are cooling down to be knocked the next day right huge Vector of contamination yeah so you're pulling all your your Bubba Barrel blocks onto this cooling rack right and then that cooling rack is essentially like you know your nice clean awesome you're going to knock up you have one bag of neurospora or whatever in here it's pushing through the patch all seen a hole in the bag whatever right yeah sorry unicorn but you're not the best all the time um you're going to end up with an issue here like either these Hep filter fans will pull through here or recirculating factor is what I suggested to them was put a 2x4 Hep filter up here to positive pressurize this space with laminar flow so that your lab is sort of cooled from the top another issue to resolve is the drain um have to block the drain off they like oh just P trap it and I was like can't have just standing water in a sterile lab you want to like pour bleach down it every day you could probably get away with it for a second but just tape it up you know yep um yeah that's just like no matter what industry you're talking about floor drains and labs are yeah it's kind of a oxymoron yeah and I think that it goes without saying that when you try and do too many things in one area you end up with a a lot of difficult to control scenarios so the only real like solution to this is to split this system and you know have a wall here when you do that how the are you going to get from your entrance which is like two by two into your lab unless you're committed to tearing off the uh the tub yeah just get rid of the tub she wed up to me so gracefully myown ofs come in she said I'll give you shelter you put outside even you know make a little insulated space for it yeah yeah just it's such a strange thing when people like look at small you know like Footprints of a building and they're like I can do so much in here you're like the reality is you really can't well how much space you need to just keep for Access yeah it's like always underestimated as well as independent controls too so like access movement changing clothes whole nine yards yeah um yeah it's a tricky tricky scenario the other like shortcut interesting solution was like okay in this attic space if we insulate it really well and we have a single Flo Hood um they have like I think there's like an access port up here or something so they can get into the attic they don't have to like remove the filter um but they're going to end up in a scenario where they have to pull this filter down through a clean space in order to bring a new one in instead of just like setting it in because the hole is like super small so unless they want to tear out like floor joist the whole nine yards it becomes a serious issue

15:09 so my instinct was to say overpower this in some way with like a you know even a three ton system or a couple Mini Splits or a uh you know um moderately small sized like heatcraft unit they're like why don't we just do some window AC's with some cool Bots and the reason why I wouldn't do that is because when you're bringing these steaming hot blocks out into your space downstairs and you're you know moving air up and down like this you're basically oh yeah and this is a little like damper that goes back up into the attic or the plenum um is you're just going to freeze up the coils on the window AC five seconds yeah and then your shit's not going to cool down you're G to have a ton of issues you have to go up there and shut it off let it defrost yeah at that point it's not doing any Cooling and then that can become just a daily yeah routine yeah for sure I think what I learned in like conversating with these folks about this scenario is is like an interesting sort of uh like a micro grasp on these small processes but like a failure to really understand how they interact and I think those interactions are really like important to sort of strategically lay out to somebody so that they understand these different environments go through different changes or have to remain extremely stable um so I don't know maybe it's important to like list them out we basically have like different zones if you will uh we have like your you know mixed steam Zone which is just like always hot as all hell so unregulated temperature wise humidity wise it's just crazy and then you have your cool and lab and if these things are basically the same or connected which they totally can be it just means you can't work in a lab as it's cooling substrate down it just has to be a um uh cooled and filtered and then in the scenario for incubation you're going to end up with CO2 regulation um plus cooling um and constant so those two things need like a need a constant sort of you know stabilization Factor whereas these are going to sort of like it's going to go up and down this really should just be very stable stable as possible and then when it comes down to Fring why you can't combine these things and why these are separate elements basically is because you need further CO2 control um Cooling and sort of Regulation so you can have your Cooling and your humidity go up and down a little bit um yeah it's worth pointing out on the incubation side too I feel like this is some basic thing that isn't kept in mind all the time is uh like stable incubation temperatures are really helpful in the respect that the organism as it incubates no matter what will not be stable it goes through it different Cycles as it grows and yeah if you can provide a stable environment then it's going to go through those Peaks and valleys of its temperatures in a more uh healthy way whereas if you're already imposing Chaos on it that's where you get into all kinds of with um with incubation especially for tricky varieties yeah tricky varieties like despite how you end up cooling or I'm sorry despite how how you end up cooking the substrate it doesn't really matter at that point if you're having volatile environment you're going to have volatile incubation or colonization what I think I mean to like draw out with this chart too is like these three four things are basically like uh they're independent environments they can't really pull from one another right um the only really connecting Factor here and we can talk about this in terms of like if we want to go into incubation and and lab is like you can use the cooling Factor if it's sufficient enough from incubation to cool your lab as long as the cooling factor or the heat load that's being put into here to cool the substrate is getting pushed out yeah you can't have a closed loop without contradicting that temperature stability and incubation yeah exactly so this really is one way um this can't go this way you have too much CO2 in your

20:10 incubation it'll up your Fring um and the other you know the other way supplies too so if you have a hyper amount of cooling in your Fring and you're trying to put that into your incubation you're going to have like high Spore load high humidity yeah tons of yeah all kinds of problems not to mention even if you have all super duper HEPA filtered um you are going to radically reduce the performance and lifespan of those filters yeah you are they can last for like 10 years or something you know but as long as you don't spray them withle yeah yeah if you just use them and abuse them they'll get really quickly it's true we have some great photo examples of that oh should we clap for Kelly one two three oh we did it for you um like how the synonymous clapping is like bring it up on the screen oh man uh yeah so let's go back to the scenario of why this chart sort of is very applicable for this square space where you're trying to cook uh you're trying to uh have a lab cool cook cool incubate so if you want to inate here and you want to knock here and you want to cool here and you're using that all in the same space you end up with these super fractured and up and down sort of temperature ranges despite how constant you try to keep that you know temperature and that mostly just comes down to the cooling Factor so the reason like uh these things don't interact incubation and Cooling it's obvious right two fluctuating temperatures for incubation super unstable incubation um so when I brought this up to these folks as an example they were like oh we'll just do one knock and then we'll incubate all the and then we'll bring it out and then we'll start the cycle all over again I was like that'll work for all of one week right CU they'll just realized they need more you know and oh Jesus we didn't make enough so we got this new uh new restaurant to sell to or right right right you can't just crank it up you know yeah so like it might be a great ideal situation for Cycles I totally don't fight that whatsoever but thinking preemptively about where Farms go and especially in this world is you know mushroom Farms are exploding it's like man you're going to need to do back toob back Tob backs eventually so yeah and certainly you're going to need to do uh more than one run every like two weeks at the utmost with the fastest varieties yeah you're going to want to at least be doing one run a week pretty soon yeah for sure um and if so that's that's a reason why these two things can't cross the reason why these two things can't cross or be in the same space is obvious for contamination reasons you just have you know a slight you know tear in a bag that's contaminated or anything like that and these things will start um these things will start you know basically creating a huge slurry of crazy yeah not to mention one thing that I've been thinking about a little bit um is you know HEPA filters this whole concept about how they can uh either be your source of sterile air or just blowing right contamination and problems over everything yeah a lot of people you know to like save electricity and whatnot um aren't keeping the HEPA filters on at all times or or they uh may not have an adjustable reat where they can dial down its fan speed and so if the he filter is off in that Matrix of paper and whatnot inside of it's just sitting there yeah um if there's let's say um uh you know moisture kind of wicking off cooling blocks y or respirating out of filter patches or mold uh escaping from a contamin at BL that if that filter is not actively working it'll just soak in or if it's just a humid environment it'll just soak in whatever is there if it's not actively pushing out oh yeah um so that's a very quick way to also compromise the knock table to begin with yeah yeah it's totally true man and I think it it's worth examining like here's the front of a filter patch bag here's you know the filter this filter is the like cross point between out side and your sterilized or pasteurized substrate right so like gas exchange is the key here so you have a super stable uh sort of humidity Source out here and

25:11 you have like 66% hydrated um 66 I love 666 62% is hydrated substrate inside of this bag we must find a way we must make this six six six other poing arms and legs off um gas exchange means like CO2 being generated in here and fresh O2 out here have this ability to cross this patch like if it is too humid out here like Tyler saying in the sense that you're cooling down something that's creating a lot of humidity because these are all 60% and it's hot you can definitely have more uh more of a contamination Risk by the fact that these patches are getting wet and they're pulling across things that are contaminated from incubation via this fan yeah and nothing is perfectly hydrophobic yeah um filter patches included so once that water's uh you know soaked into a filter despite the fact that they are relatively waterproof yeah um it's just a direct conduit for for mold to get in yeah it's huge like it's huge to sort of like contemplate these weird actual because I think we think of like a filter patch as this like perfect hermetic you know unit of safety perfect it depends too especially if you're using like a an a filter from unicorn let alone a b filter right um they're increasingly porous as you go up the the stack yeah fun fact I just had to bring up um Cap N Stem's average water pressure water uh gallons per minute is 6.66 we measured it our contamination rate the other day 6.66 I was like this is bad we have to get back down what's Happening Here we must be incubating in our cool down I think the number just follows us we're special yeah yeah we'll have to see how that goes in the future see so because these things can't interact with one another like in a really consistent constant way how might we create a solution for this in in this context in this tiny ass scenario where we have this you know cubically miniature building that really shouldn't even exist on paper well um I feel like one thing's for sure uh terms of the layout um just as a general principle you need more incubation space than lab space so if you took incubation out entirely yeah and I would just consider rearranging these things um if possible and uh prioritizing more of that right 2/3 or so of the structure to incubating because you're indeed not going to want to do one run and wait for it to finish before you do another yeah um so in that respect just a general notion of having more of the space committed another thing you'd have to think of right off the bat is is access where the door is going to be and how do you get from one place to the other yep um so that that concrete tub ain't going away huh conrete tub here to stay maybe this will convince them maybe I'll send them this video and be like just knock the tub out man take the tub out I that would be the first thing I'd recommend doesn't really need to be there you know how therapists like meet up to talk about their patients and how much of they are they're like sort of like I think social workers therapists like a lot of people are you have to do this right this is our version of working through problems for other people I would consider to I don't know exactly where it is and if if you can recall but another fundamentally different thing to consider would be like more of a U-shaped design for the uh for the clean spaces if you have that floor drain and you don't want it in clean space to begin with assuming it is kind of right where you put it one thing it's literally like right there one thing you could consider is like having this like Annex kind of space right here for your steaming yep and then you can keep the floor drain I guess for any slashing and whatnot sure um and then and then you can have kind of a flow pattern like that where you could have let's say like this was I draw over this yeah for sure in a different color um he's green today let's say it's this because you're high Tyler it's the first color I saw when I was one week old um

30:11 say Geniuses choose green but he didn't pick the color so if that was your uh your bubble Barrel Zone yep and then you had something going on like are we assuming we're like taking the bathtub of this is with the bathtub here so number one remove the goddamn concrete pull up the concrete thing on the screen it's taken up very valuable real estate in this tiny I assume approximately 10 by10 situation I guess I should have said to him on the phone it sounds like you don't think this is going to work therefore you should just admit failure now and get out because he's like oh we might go back to milk and cows or whatever the okay if we're doing it though I'm just on on this idea to basically round it out and make it yeah yeah so one way to do it take out the tub for sure because if that's taking up whatever a quarter or 20% of the space then doesn't need to be there because the Bubba Barrel doesn't need to take up that much space yeah so we're saying we're putting the Bubba Barrel here something like that yeah right yep and then you have something trying to think of this is enough space but some portion of this end maybe the whole thing for your knock so let's just do that real quick and this is your knock here let's take the uh we'll take my out of here right so we've we've taken this tub out we're basically utilizing that drain in the Bubba Barrel Bubba bub bub Bubba bub uh this is your knock yeah cool and knock yep you got your recirculating hea right there you got one from the ceiling that part can stay kind of constant yep yeah and I think that's dead center so almost like over the so it can be ducted this way okay okay um and uh then you got your door right here and then here's your incubation environment proportions may be slightly off one way or the other because you'd want to be able to um at the very least in a situation you're like okay we're just going to cultivate fast things that take give or take two weeks um you're going to want um three weeks of space is the general idea so you have space for that third week when the original one is at two weeks you're not in a position where you constantly have to do musical chairs yeah um to uh to have literally just enough you know whatever it would be eight square feet to fit in a rack or yeah so let's say you're doing 80 bubble barrels you just need in one rack is 80 Blocks you're going to need three racks at minimum to very basic species right call two we incubators space to let them breathe yep so it's not just one giant block of heat Y and ultimate death um yeah so that would be one way to consider it yeah because what my suggestion would be too is to cool over here and basically create either a um either a wall where the filtration and the cooling factor from incubation and your knock passively like pull from the ceiling so they pull from up here and they go down into the lab and down into incubation Y and that way you know you have your little cooling your yeah your cool Corner over here you're basically you can push this out through the window so yeah if this is coming out at 100 or 200° get it out yeah yeah and goes without saying uh in insulate the hell out of as many of these walls as you can yeah especially these guys and upstairs honestly if you're using this as a plenum yeah you need to make sure that that's super insulated um because essentially what you're going to do is create a recirculation in these two spaces um coming from up here and you're going to use that recirculation from upstairs into these two rooms to push that way not this way so path of loose resistance means you're going to want some sort of you know um duct way so that that air that's cooled but also positive pressurized can push this way and then out the window and that way it's filtered you could even put a filter on this wall if you wanted to maybe like a 2 by two um and positive pressurize this space yeah that's probably the smarter thing to do right right but this would at least work Yeah well yeah yeah and that way you know this area remains relatively dirty but as we all know about Ultra pasturization you have a moment where that the minute these things are done cooking you can pull them out so maybe this has like a little

35:13 door in it you know so you can open it up pop the lid pull the blocks out onto a nice clean you know sterile rack and then let them cool down it does involve wrecking your precious milk tub though or just go back to milk and cows go back to milk and cows my other scenario too and I told him like you can separate this stuff out it doesn't all have to be in this one roof they have other space but I think the area some political situation on the farm where it's got to be the milk I don't know why maybe they they do like um uh like Neo agrarian Anarchist tours and they really want you know people that come see their quasi Milk Barn that was converted into a hip mushroom knock space I don't know either way yeah yeah in that case just make it as dysfunctional as you want charge a lot of money for ecotourism and be like dude we're growing trick ofera we're growing a tricoderma or asilis as a yeah um what's it a sorbic acid or whatever scor acid um just're making vitamin C making the vitamin C man that's true uh the other issue that I guess we didn't really bring up so let's say this actually works and they want to they want to go down this Avenue right Bubba drain entrance incubation uh knock and cool with obviously your AC Plum upstairs is how do you get in and out of these environments without creating a ton the like you know convoluted air movement back and forth yeah so without getting it like how crazy this could be you kind of need some sort of you know entrance to this space and you're going to go through incubation which can pull contaminants you know across and into your lab I know we're getting crazy here but the reality is like you have to think about these things if you're going to really work with a 100 squ foot building yeah you're essentially creating a lab and a incubation in a mix and a steam in a tiny house yeah so well in a perfect world uh when it's possible ideally you just move in a linear pattern one way in one way out there's Farms that are designed this way yeah um they should be designed this way uh so ideally you're not oh I forgot to grab this and let me go back into here and go back into here and then back into here and yeah yeah and you know maybe the most sensitive really is just right here if you're not having go on in here before this stuff is cool so if you actually do have a wall before you go through this little door to pull these racks through or whatever it is maybe it's just a curtain whatever but you just tyx suit you know in this space and then you pull these things out to cool down and pull out here it's tough I mean any any way you slice it like looking at these things becomes like a serious issue because ideally they wouldn't do any of the seven here they would just take incubation out right they would Steam and they would knock and then they would move the rack somewhere else for incubation sake right yeah it's a good example it's a tough one man I mean I've been presented I'm sure as you have with so many of these like dude this is going to work perfect look at this spit B I don't know but the reality is it's not you know going to always that's a good example because it touches like uh upon in a minute way a bunch of the most common things that people want to try that look great um in theory such as um well let's go to uh Clos Loop recirculation of air with the entire facility from Fring to incubation we touched on it a little bit but that's something that I know you and I have heard proposed to us when people are designing their new space or their first space yeah frequently um of maintaining this perfect efficiency and especially some people coming from like an engineering background with some familiarity with HVAC yeah and to be like how can we save as much of this air as possible right um and come these very very elaborate and very passionate ideas about perfect recirculation and then those plans have to get squashed yeah generally yeah there's some very big farms out there uh that have for instance like reer units inside of their

40:13 fruit rooms just because like in by Refrigeration I mean like uh evaporative cooling units sucking spores right through the coils blasting out dirty spor rid air clogging up the coils to the point where they have to tear the entire thing apart every week I'm not mentioning who that is but if you've been there you know it is like the most asinine waste of Labor I've ever seen it doesn't make any sense to me so and what was their motivation to do it in the first place I think they don't understand the idea of a plenum right and yeah like a fan is three amps and it's gonna create some level of eat yeah but you don't need that stable of temperatures and Fring in order to jeopardize really expensive equipment right right so like they've gone to that degree and there's they're not alone like there's a lot of farms that operate like this but you know it's not it's none of these things are ideal until you really split those things apart like we just showed the four different sort of areas so yeah let's let's assume a random Farm wants to exist and they want Fring incubation and a knock all to be within the same building right right um that presents like a lot of complications I know uh you know how crazy has Corey gone down the rabbit hole from Hi-Fi like trying to like get the ideal situation underway for his new facility you have to like look at these things for a long time and determine like exactly how they're going to actually uh work with one another because without introducing like coolers to this scenario or any refrigerated space office space packing space any of that and there's a lot of it we're just looking at elementary differences between um actual production space cooling um incubation or Cooling and lab incubation and Fring and how they really can't interact with one another so like it's probably just most simple to just draw it as a grid sure so we have like a mix area and obviously they're not four quarters you need twice as much incubation as Fring and so on and so forth right yeah but say you want to do the whole thing and I just mean substr production model sub production the basic sort of conceptual idea is the mix and steam area or mix yeah I'm GNA call mix and steam most people are doing that doesn't have to be very regulated it's just regulated for Comfort right uh um beg for Comfort man I told myself don't talk in a wean accent the entire thing statting man man man um and then we have our lab and cool right so as dirty mix steam air super hot and volatile uh and just dirty doesn't go into the lab this stuff can bleed off into here exactly and you this the simplest way to fight against that pretty good pressure threshold yeah just be pumping it out and in a perfect world even it just has to be like a little tiny closet but in a perfect world there's a little buffer between the two yeah yeah it just has to be a separation of whatever it is and you know as you pointed out in other episodes and stuff like you can have a steam box and and say it's in the corner and you can pull you know your through a semi dirty area to cool down without very much risk at all um our third sort of section to this is incubation so this thing generates a ton of AC power and really high CO2 so high CO2 and temperature control you can pull this way um but I certainly would not recommend pulling this way and that's for ton of reasons right this has a volatile temperature range um and if this is super hot and you're just pulling out 200 degree blocks you don't want to dump that into incubation despite how you're cooling this lab so this lab needs independent cooling from incubation and you want to take that independent Cooling and dump it back into a mix SL steam area or directly outside incubation high CO2 and temperature control can certainly pull from incubation if it's powerful enough to cool down your lab yep or perhaps you're in a situation where uh you have a plenum above all of this yeah bird's eye view and then they're just independent yeah totally and I think that's like the ideal but I think most

45:14 people don't have like you know that's like the beauty of this Milk Barn as an example is like there's a pre-existing Plum right it's pretty sweet if you put a an you know an adequate size AC in there like you just created a really kind of cool closed loop environment for cooling from above and you could even have independent areas you know ducting wise um depending upon how big that space is but uh then we have Fring so Fring needs its own independent controls um you certainly don't want to go this way and you certainly don't want to go this way so neither of these work for air exchanges so in the grand scheme of production these three things can work with with one another you sort of like the process starts in One Direction and goes to the other and the airf flow can come uh the opposite direction so those two things sort of pass one another but the real issue becomes when you want to involve Fring in these scenarios a lot of people really try to uh over engineer as you put it like how they're going to utilize this cooling Factor over here for Fring the only way to do it if you're actually like cooling from here and this becomes a high CO2 environment um is to have independent cooling factors out here and they basically cool from the outside of the building and they get flushed to the outside of the building it's just a one-way path if you put too much of a Spore load in there uh or too much dirty air in any of these directions you're going to risk this environment and if you put anything going from this direction into fruiting you're not going to have the temperature control and you're going to have a spike in CO2 right so really this area just has to completely be dis Ed from you know everything to do with the closed loop that can be production yeah um yeah if you're if you're from above I feel like it would be even cooler how do we draw that that's like a space age to think about but so if we have this like weird cooling plenum say you have two independent floors right right right I think I'm putting him to sleep he doesn't care anymore it's over this is your Plum upstairs and you essentially have four grids on the FL for four independent rooms down here um and these four independent rooms can be fed by a single AC system right so if your Plum can AC activate you know four different fans for four different areas great the real issue becomes you can't recirculate right and you'll have to have disproportionate uh application of that air to here yeah mly and then there exactly and then you can't pull it into your your Fring at all so great scenario is it's a pre-filter room um pre-filter pre conditioning and cooling these two areas in particular through ining lab great um we sort of went over that a bit in the lab design and stuff right but I think it's important to make use of vertical space if you have it that's what we'll be doing in our dirty lose spot all right I've talked too much what do you think I think that was very succinct um got really broke down a lot of the basic stuff micro problems um there would be some other types of topics of these common Corners cut um I feel like so much of the the conversations I have to come down to like independent room control um if you really want there to be even air exchange within a lab within a Fring room within a incubation space you really do need independent controls for each of those things so it does kick out a lot of engineering aspects you know and I don't try to give to Engineers I think there's such a thing as like idiot seant and that's this traps them all the time right well and also it's like if you're coming from outside that biological context where you're not just factoring in uh you know just more basic H fat concepts of recirculation but you're also have to factor in Spore load and temp stability and the different needs of each of these spaces yeah require like a rewiring a lot of uh ordinary precepts that people have with with HVAC and so forth yeah it totally does yeah I mean incubation is its own like interesting nightmare when it comes to that depending upon what

50:14 you're incubating right the filter patch bag the sensitivity of the material do you need a plenum can you just have an AC directly you know ducted in um yeah it gets it gets comp oh and then another thing to think about too is um with the recirculation aspect is like you said fans produce heat yeah um and you have to factor that in when you're thinking of okay if I'm going to pump in air let's say from my incubation space to my inoculation space if it's at let's say 65 yeah in your incubation space it's not going to be at 65 by the time it gets through um any HEPA filtration or whatnot from one room to the next it's going to be hotter than that um yeah let's give an example of like our uh our sub incubation it's fed by these you know massive uh evap coolers and then there's condensers on the roof right so four condensers for four evaps so this thing is basically like propelling a ton of air into a space to keep the temperature at 66 Fahrenheit this isn't filtered really doesn't need to be for substrate you know we're not dealing with spawn and and the sensitivities of high nutrient grain but if we want to use the excess of cooling in here and we want to cool an incubation space that is uh indeed it needs to be filtered for instance um so we put a HEPA filter here and a fan here and we pull conditioned air across this is going to be like 68 to 7 right um for a number of reasons but a if you're positive pressurizing a space all that sort of uh generated heat inside of here is like pushed out and then slowly evacuated from this room depending upon how much pressure is in here and then like you're just saying uh you know you're going to have some heat creation here so heat generation heat generation means that this creating a you know positive pressured environment will increase the heat by x amount so right if you're trying to create a scenario like that and that forces us into a scenario where um because in the context of a high nutrient growing medium uh you have to be more mindful of temps that high yeah to start to look into independent AC uh for that space because ideally um it is not warmer than substrate it's a hotter growing medium so um you ideally want it lower than 66 mid to low 60s um into okay just a fundamentally independent uh AC unit to feed this room as nice as this is and was um just to have that proper stable environment it's another reason why I think a lot of people don't understand like the importance of accurate cooling um something like I just learned which is really interesting um specifically about these units that we use which you know are just like going into a walk-in cooler these evaporative coolers have different like distances and depths and then ranges so the the actual coil size the fan speed um as well as the type of you know refrigerant in there can create different um differentials right yeah differentials in terms of humidification in an environment or or whatever so uh it's important to really like work with HVAC that way and know how you can control these things because if you had these things generating um you know 66 degree air which is ideal for this you can lower them because they're you know meant to be chillers and freezers down to 60 or down to 50 or down to 40 or down to zero right and that's the advantage of these units and why I often see people really like get caught up in the like do I just need a water chiller do I need a a traditional HVAC system these things are as simple and as affordable as they it gets when it comes down to like consistently controlling temperature so you know heatcraft is just like one company but there's a lot of different units out there um that create these evaporative cooling units so take it by an example of you worked in a shitty restaurant and uh you were inside of a walk-in cooler you just take that unit put it in your incubation compressor sits outside you have tons of cool there yep so the efficiencies for that are a lot more uh prevalent than traditional you know cooling units so if you're going to do that in this space ideally you just have like a pre-cooling

55:16 space or pre-filter space so you're hyper chilling this and then you're taking that chill air and you're putting it into your space so that means if you're pumping in here at like 60 and that adds 2 Dees you're at like 62 right so right the heat generation here is also you know a relative factor to consider and that's why density of these things really matters so I can definitely see in the first case scenaria like when we're talking about this dude's like milk room space he's gonna have to have so much cooling capacity for 100 square foot space because of what he wants to do in there right it's like you're trying to cool down blocks trying to incubate like hot blocks um and you're trying to like keep people sane it doesn't seem like a lot of space you know and then counteract the bubble Barrel when it's in operation right and the amount of heat that it wants to sink into the rest of it yeah yeah yeah it's a lot so at the end of the day you got to get really creative when you really want to uh with microaces micro problems what else is that it we could go on um could go on forever feel like it's a good it's a good breaking point to just explain those differentials yeah and then you know maybe the next episode we'll go into incubation right and like in detail how fig that stuff out yeah that's the other one we were mulling about is like incubation environments Fring environments yeah and how they relate to metab metabolism yep that two-way uh you know consideration of you know what are the organisms doing what densities they're at how is the room designed and how do those things affect each other yeah relates to a lot of what we talked about yeah and they have a huge uh down the line sort of effect too higher the heat bigger the block faster the metabolism more hyper the organism lower the heat lower the activity colonizes too slowly blah blah blah yeah we'll go over that that's our next episode we've decided right here now cool how long have we been going solidly incubation what do we got what do we got one hour it's a good hour dude we reached it we reached it I'm Eric lomman I'm Tyler Crawford you