Building Grow Rooms from Scratch

At this time, I've realized that honing the fruiting conditions by controlling temperature more tightly is more important than quantity. The grow tents that I had used formerly - from AC Infinity - had basically no insulation. I recall placing an AC unit in one of them to "pre-condition" the air before feeding into the next room to lower the temperature in the summer. The temperature lowed by only a couple degrees -_-. This is because I had no idea of even the elementary principles of physics.

The AC infinity grow tents have essentially zero temperature insulation and any heating or cold simply transfers outward through the tent walls without moving onwards to the next tent. To remediate this problem, I realize that I needed to do three things:

1) Build temperature insulated grow rooms (Using wooden frame and ~R-7 insulation panels)

2) Decrease the size of the grow rooms for easier heating/cooling

3) Create a preconditioning room with the AC/Heating units to set accurate temperature.

Looking back, these things sound so astonishingly obvious that it is a wonder that I did not see them as pre-requisites for starting mushroom farming. I guess I really did have no clue what I was doing when I first started.

To keep things simply, my friend and I bought 2" x4"s from home depot in the size of 2 feet and four feet. We made the base 4x2 feet and made the height 4 feet. This gives approximately ~32 cubic feet of space allowing for maybe growing approximately 10 lbs of mushrooms a week (about a third of the total volume). Maybe it can go up given that the climate will be controlled more accurately from this point out.

We bought PVC panels to line the wood with and hammered them into the wooden frame and then placed insulating foam panels in between the wood glued onto the back of the panels. While talking to Gemini AI, I learned that placing the panels directly onto the wood is not the best method as heat can transfer through these more thermally conductive pathways. However, given the that the volume of the grow tent is now effectively one/fifteenth of what it used to be in addition to the R-7 insulation around most of the box, even with some leakage, I would think that it is at least 30 - 50x more efficient than it was before. This will make cooling and heating much easier.

I learned that even buying the 2 by 4s of the same two-feet or four-feet lengths sometimes result in slightly different lengths which must trimmed. My friend and I did not do this, leading to small gaps in between the wood pieces, but I am happy with what we came up with so far. We have finished the wooden frame and glued most of the PVC panels on, so now it just remains to put in the insulation and then figure out a way to put on a door and a small window

Regarding the door, it seems like the best way to move forward with it, is simply to glue to PVC panel to the insulation behind it and then line the sides with some sort of weather stripping which I can then use to plug into the 4 feet by 4 feet area in front. The removal of the door allows for easy harvesting and cleaning. Then a small window can be added by cutting out maybe a 1 foot by 1 foot -ish hole and then putting two pieces of plexiglass inside and siliconing the edges. This seems simple enough and is the conclusion I came to after chatting with Gemini AI for fifteen minutes.

I'm sure that as I build out the second and third and fourth grow rooms after I prototype the first, there may be ways to improve this, but as someone with very limited construction experience, it is likely better to keep things easy.

Once this is done, I can add a small hole for funneling in humidity, a small hole for electrical wiring, then four holes on each side for an inline fan access on the top and the bottom (CO2 sinks so the intake will be on the top and the exhaust with the inline fan creating negative pressure on the bottom). I will feed air preconditioned to around ~60F into the chamber and voila! a temperature controlled fruiting room for my blue oyster mushrooms and lions mane with extremly easy cleaning. This will definitely enable me to run production with much better consistency.