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This represents 6 months of nothing but failed trays: Without going into too much detail, I have a friend that has changed to this style of sistema airtight tupper ware containers as trays. Hes tried verm/coir & Hpoo/Straw and combinations of both... Has an expensive 900mm wide professional flow hood, showers before hand then douses himself in iso propyl before handling anything. Admittedly he was not using gloves and doing ALL his work bare hand - but now has many boxes of rubber disposable gloves (in case this is where he went wrong). In the past he has used bare hands and had 100% success - but the style of tray was much more open, with a foil lid. He purchased these trays, drilled holes in the lids and covered with micropore thinking it would be a more airtight contam barrier style of tray. But literally not a single tray has colonized in this time, only one got green mold, everything else the spawn seemed scared of the substrate, wouldn't even jump off. Other times the substrate sort of half colonizes then stalls out... There is nearly always a sour grape or sour apple smell to these failed trays. Trays are spawned with usually 50% spawn. We are both thinking maybe the substrate is getting suffocated. He went for the clear trays so he could visually see the progression without having to open them, or guess (due to non clear tray) But potentially with these non clear trays he used initially, the every second day opening to view progress actually helped provide them with FAE resulting in success? This sour grape/apple smell mentioned earlier, he noticed this smell early on even in the successful non clear trays, but with opening every second day the smell seemed to air out and eventually dissipate as the substrate was colonized. Then final product smelt mushroomy and healthy, after first smelling sour. (This was with the successful ones) So whats going wrong here? - no gloves, contaminates under finger nails? - too deep substrate (100mm+?) with not enough FAE 'Suffocation' ? - Using a PC sterilized metal cheese grater to grate the cakes - is this a bad idea, if you grate spawn too fine does it die or dry out? ^Other than these 3 possibilities we really have not much to work on here... VERY FRUSTRATING! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Does anyone have any kind of tray they can recommend that has been successful in the past for them? Would maybe those disposable oven bake foil trays be a better option, 1 time use kind of thing? - problem is you cant see the sides to see if anything is side pinning, or contaminating.