The 1 critical mistake we made that was KILLING our mushrooms — Learn from us!
- CO2, what CO2?
- The pretty simple fix
Want to see the ugliest mushrooms ever created?
This is what they are supposed to look like…
So how did our incubator “Auri” that has been designed to grow mushrooms autonomously end up creating such a monster?
The answer is CO2…
Mushrooms respire CO2 and breath in Oxygen, just like humans; and also like humans, they find CO2 toxic.
But we knew about this. We had a CO2 sensor on the back which was designed to trigger a fresh air exchange if the CO2 got too high… and it performed perfectly.
What we didn’t take into account was the weight of a CO2 molecule compared to air. It’s much heavier, and so it was pooling at the bottom of the chamber. Similar to how a bowling ball would sink to the bottom of a swimming pool.
Because our sensor was mounted about halfway up the chamber, it took hours for the CO2 to pool up enough to reach the sensor and trigger a fresh air exchange. By then, the mushrooms had been sitting in extreme concentrations of CO2 for hours on end and they essentially suffocated.
So what did we do to fix it?
We decided to install a strong circulation fan at the top of the chamber:
This fan blows over the face of the mushrooms and down to the bottom of the chamber where it lifts the heavy CO2 up and mixes it with the air inside. This gives a uniform mixture of CO2 and air, allowing the CO2 sensor to read an accurate value and trigger a fresh air exchange at the correct time.
The result has been marvelous…
The photo on the left was grown inside the chamber with our automatic humidification and fresh air exchange system. The photo on the right was grown in ambient conditions using a spray bottle.
The yield was definitely larger inside the chamber, and in our opinion, prettier as well. But this is only a small win for us so far as we look to venture to harder to grow strains.
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We are building a set-and-forget mushroom cultivator, designed to grow extreme varieties of mushrooms with the press of a button.
