Laboratory Design

Building a clean laboratory is extremely important if you are going to be making your own spawn and blocks for fruiting. The costs can be kept to a minimum, but there are a few things that are necessary in order to be successful.

First is an enclosed space that can be turned into your lab. Ideally this would be a room that has two or three doors between what is to be the laboratory space and the outside. The more space between your "clean" room and the outside the less likely it is that outside contaminants can get in.

You will need to build or buy a workstation on which you will do all your clean work (maintaining cultures, inoculations, pouring plates, etc.). This is often made up of hoods that push air through HEPA filters (laminar flow hoods) places on top of a table that has a stainless steel surface for easy cleaning and rust resistance. The laminar flow hoods should be encased in plexiglass so that positive pressure at your workspace ensures a clean working environment.

Pressure sterilizers are used to sterilize substrates on which you will be growing mushrooms throughout all stages of growth. Whether you are working with mycelia cultures on agar plates, making grain spawn, or inoculating substrate blocks for fruiting, the growing media will always need to be sterilized first, and all this work needs to be done in front of your laminar flow hoods.

I recommend installing an air recuperator as a part of the air system, as it helps with three aspects of the laboratory. A recuperator will ensure adequate air exchange in the laboratory, at least two per hour. It will act as a prefilter by filtering out particles down to 6-7 microns for incoming airflow to the laboratory as well. The third major benefit to using a recuperator though is that you are not wasting energy reheating or cooling incoming air, the recuperator transfers the temperature of the outgoing air with that of the incoming air keeping heating and cooling costs in the laboratory to a minimum.

Whether or not you decide to use a recuperator, you will need to continue to bring oxygen into the laboratory through air exchanges. The other way this can be done is by having blowers set up on the incoming and outgoing air ducts.