dread said:
>> Soaking in room temperature water for 12-24 hours is an invitation for contams to take root in your cakes.
Bull. A fully colonized cake is extremely resistant to contamination. Also the chlorine in the tap water helps.
Yes, a fully colonized cake IS extremely resistant....for a while. As the mycelium ages and rips through the nutes it becomes LESS resisitant. While a dunk before the first flush and a dunk after the first flush will probably be just fine at room temperature subsequent dunks are better off where bacteria and mold spores will have a hard time growing.
Furthermore, dunking in the fridge can delay your next pinset for up to a week. That's a week of the cakes sitting uselessly in your FC, doing nothing but drying and wasting nutrients. If you care about yields, don't dunk in the fridge.
I've never had it take a week to repin after a fridge dunk. Usually by day 3 or 4 I've got my first pins going. For me, a few days delay is better than having to toss the cake completely. Granted, it's been 2 years since I've birthed cakes for pinning (use grain casings, but cakes are GREAT for blending and innoculating low nutrient spawn). If you are waiting a week for your cakes to pin you might just have the temp a little too low for them.
Also, if you are super worried about yields you should not be using cakes. If you are going for high yields you need to learn straw teks, poo teks, or bulk spawning teks. A grain casing, done correctly, even with a mulitspore innoculation can yield 3x a cake by volume. If you go advanced on it, isolating a superior substrain, you can double those yields.
Also, rinse your cakes under the tap before and after the dunk. This also helps against contamination considerably.
Agree 100% on this.
I'm only reporting what has worked well for me and a few friends I have introduced to the wonderful world of mycology. If you find something that works better, by all means use it and promote it. I'm not trying to get into a long debate over fridge or not to fridge, only reporting what works BEST for ME. I personally use to lose cakes more frequently when I dunked in room temp water, or double ended cased them, I then switched to just dunking in the fridge for 12+ hours and stopped using any type of rehydration while they were in the fruiting chamber (DE casings, hole in the middle to insert water, drinking straw in the center, etc...)