Environmentally Controlled Room (cold room) installation

[Kate Wellspring, Native Plant Trust]

We are planning on building a new environmentally controlled room (“cold/dry room”) for seed processing. If anyone can recommend a installation/maintenance vendor who works in the Massachusetts area, I’d be grateful for your input.

[Meg Engelhardt]

Hi Kate,

I’m wondering if you ever built your cold/dry room, and if so, what temperature and humidity conditions do you keep it at?  I am trying to decide if we want our future dry room to be both dry (20%) and cold (15C) or if dry at room temp will be preferred. Are you using your room for cool seed storage or just to prepare seed for long-term freezer storage?

Thanks,

Meg

[Kate Wellspring, Native Plant Trust]

Greetings, Meg.

Yes, we did![ We used a vendor who works in the New England area called “EnvironAir”. They were great.]

We use our dry room for both:

1.) Short-medium term seed storage — for our native plant nursery department. They sow seeds from their dry room collections that are anywhere between 1-10 years old. These are from taxa that are common in New England.

2.) Preparation for freezing –for the conservation department seed bank (that’s me). I dry/store seed in here for six months- two years depending on backlog. Our goal is to move each accession out of the dry room and into the freezer within one year of receipt. These are for taxa that are listed in any of the six New England states.

For both of these purposes, we keep this room at 15 C and 20% RH. I will note that this arrangement consumes A LOT of electricity. For this reason, we applied for a local program that leases roof top solar to non-profits for a period of seven (or eight?) years, and after that the non-profit owns them. This has helped us manage our utility bill.

I hope this information is helpful. Please do let me know if there’s anything else I can do!

Kate

 

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