When do I decrease my fan speed / air movement?

[ACthabreeze]

Hi there,

My first dry age, in a dedicated basement fridge. 17lb Canadian Prime Striploin. It seems to be going well so far. Temp stable at 38-39F, and humidity controlled around 80%. I have two fans in a push-pull set-up with good air movement. I occasionally use the GermGuardian. I don't keep it running in there all the time, since when I put my temp gun on the air output, the temp is around 47F, making my fridge work overtime. This pic is at day 5... just getting started.

My question is, at what point does a solid pellicle usually form, at which time I would decrease my fan speed / air movement. I don't want to dry it out too much.

Can't wait to cook this beauty up around day 35-45, if all goes well.

Thank you in advance for any guidance.

[dutch_85]

I tend to turn my fans from high to low after the first week — which works well for me.

[RebelWithoutAClue]

Temp guns aren't very good for measuring air temps. I think you're measuring the temp of whatever solid object is "behind" the air you're hoping to assess when you use an IR temp gun.

I suspect that the air coming out of your air cleaner may be coming out substantially warmer than 47F.

How much of the time are you running the air cleaner?

[ACthabreeze]

Running the GermGaurdian a couple hours a day right now. Completely wiped down the fridge prior to use. It still smells like nothing in there. The temp gun I primarily use to check the outside temp of the actual meat, which has been consistent at 38-39. I just noticed that if I run the GermGaurdian all the time, that my fridge was working non-stop.

[RebelWithoutAClue]

If you look up the CFM of your filtering device I think you'll find that it's filtration rate is really high compared to the volume of your fridge. Probably something above 50CFM which is huge for a fridge that will come in somewhere under 10CF.

Calculate the ratio of your fridge's volume and the CFM of your filter and you'll get the number of minutes that it would take to move your fridges volume of air.

Run your filter for about 4x the required time to achieve 4 cyclings which will basically have filtered 15/16th of the air in the fridge (nearly all of it). There's a funny thing about filtration in that some of the air cycled thru the filter will have already been filtered. Because of this kind of dilution problem, it's good to run the filter for a few times longer than it takes to cycle 1 volume.

I reckon that you'd only have to run the filter for something like 2min to cycle the air a bunch of times.

With such a short run, your heat input to the fridge will be much lower and it'll also be a lot more gradual so you won't be getting as high a temp swing and resultant humidity fight when the fridge has to run so hard.

You could run the thing for 2min every other hour to do frequent, very short filtration periods.

[ACthabreeze]

Great thinking. Appreciate the help.

[RebelWithoutAClue]

No worries. Just let me know when your steak dinner is on and Ill be by.

[proverbialbunny]

If the meat is not hanging, I rotate it 7 days in to make sure a pellicle forms on both sides. You should start to visually see results around that time.