Best way to clean/dry/store compost tea brewer?

mortyb

Member
Any recommendations for cleaning & storing my compost tea brewer?

Whenever I brew compost tea, I scrub the bucket, air stones, and tubing with hot water & dish soap, rinse heavily with water to remove all soap, then fill up 5-gallon bucket with hot water + 2 tsp of bleach. I let this sit overnight, pour it out, then hand scrub it all with water to try and remove any bleach residue.

After this, I fill up the 5-gallon bucket with water again, run the pump with the tubing & air stones to try & remove any bleach that might have soaked into the air stone.

Then I run the pump with the air stones outside of water to dry the air stones & tubing out.

After this, I dry all of the equipment with paper towels & store it.

This works most of the time, but as you guys can guess this process takes a very long time & many times I don't fully dry out the air stones & they start to develop mold on them after a while.

Does anybody have an easier more reliable method?
 

DonnyTinyHands

Well-Known Member
I just don't. Do any of that.. Airstones sit in my straight water res all the time, I pull them out for tea, put them right back when tea is done so their always in water. Bucket get dumped but not rinsed or cleaned. Never had any problems.. Sounds like a giant make work project to me.
 

DonnyTinyHands

Well-Known Member
Nature's messy AF.. your sanitizing shit so you don't get your bacteria water contaminated with bacteria.. it's crazy bro... Just don't worry about it, it all sorts itself out, when your teas brewing so long as their is lots of oxygen in the water which there is because airstones the good little guys will thrive and the nasties will die and be plant food. They have fancy science names but I can't spell that shit.
 

mortyb

Member
@DonnyTinyHands haha yeah, I'm not going to lie I've always thought that myself. I thought that was the point of keeping it aerobic so the good bacteria would survive & the bad stuff would die out.

Going to try to keep it simple on the next brew and see what happens
 

4ftRoots

Well-Known Member
Just a fun side note. Aerobic bacteria easily out compete anaerobic bacteria. Same with good vs bad bacteria. So if you have enough oxygen you have nothing to worry about!
 
Top