Just gonna jump in here, A few things I thought would be helpful here from having some past experience with home sterilization from making my own nutrient blends for MMJ & Mycology I thought this chart would be helpful to those who can’t reach 15psi., I used to do 9psi for 2.5hrs to achieve sterilization that actually was for sure sterile in an Instapot.
You can sterilize something at say…11psi but it’ll take more time inside the cooker/autoclave to be sterile but it will sterilize. The 23qt Presto I’ve used for years to sterilize liquids, grains, and PP5 Petri Dishes is overkill and I used an Instapot for almost a year before switching over and had no contamination outbreaks in my 2 tent systems for weed or in my 18oz mason jars of nutrient blends or 10mL syringes filled with living liquid cultures of (legal) mushroom varieties. The chart listed is for Grain Spawn for mushrooms so divide the time by ~3 and you’ll have the approx time for equipment sterilization but I’ve been around genuine mycologists who flash sterilize at like 18psi for 10min and say that 15 psi for longer than 30min is wasting time.
Also something I wanted to point out, almost all FFU’s produce Laminar airflow, and if they don’t, the Alibaba brand ones still have enough Horsepower to push the contaminated air past the center-face of the grill and tests show that even with a FFU leaking air around the face without laminar flow, the center is almost always up to standard ~99.93% filtration purity as long as the filter itself is fully intact and within its lifespan or reached/went beyond its usage limit.
I did a test with living tissue culture samples on Petri dishes: one with an open plate of sporulating trichoderma contaminated mushroom cultures on the same tray (trays pictured on sample table) within ~8-12” of another open Petri dish with a non contaminated tissue culture and dropped the uncontaminated into the liquid nutrient and there was no outbreaks of Trich contamination that had to be overcome in the uncontaminated liquid nutrient turning culture over the next 2 weeks. That should give a general idea to how powerful these devices are and since then I’ve upgraded to a TerraUniversal Smart FFU that way I can slap a control unit on there here when the missus allows for a frivolous purchase (and gotten over this one) to sterilize the room while I shower and prep myself before entering the room but seriously, not much difference between the two, in fact I can slap the Terrauniversal HEPA or ULPA filter face on a specific Alibaba FFU model and it’ll screw in all 12 of the holes where the TerraUniversal face will. Just wanted to say my piece on a few things I’ve seen on the homebrew threads, which by the way, thank you for the pioneering. There seems to be some overlap between old hobbies and this new one and am looking forward to seeing what can be applied from one to the other.
That being said, has anyone found Syringe Filters that can be home sterilized? Those are the final part to this that’s driving my OCD crazy; I don’t know if I wanna make enough in one go at the start to use a bottle top filter or go Syringe Filter and if I do go syringe filter has anyone found Acrylic housing PTFE hydrophobic .22um filters or would you guys even consider it worth buying unsterile then trying to sterilize them?
Thanks for coming to my PEDtalk lol.
TL;DR if you wanted to go all out for sterility, there wouldn’t be a need other than the Alibaba FFU model that has the same screw alignment as the Terrauniversal models, a TerraUniversal 2’x4’ HEPA Filter face to swap onto the Alibaba and a Presto 24qt pressure canner with a ghetto floor made from a few screws at Home Depot to raise the floor plate and can buy the 2x steel separation plates together, put one on top of whatever you’ve got inside to make sure that if something goes wrong inside the PC, the upper plate will be there to stop the obstruction from blocking the air vent and emergency vent stopper. Hope this helps for pressure cooker sterilization.
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