Microbe Testers!?!

Anyone use anything to test their microbial content? Especially a portable meter? I found a luminometer that's used in sanitation for like $1,250... I think that would be good to have in building soil from scratch with your own recipe and to measure if your tap water kills them when used.

Yeah I'm learning to do qualitative assays with the microscope at the mo:
You take samples of the soil and check out its microbial diversity to ascertain the "richness" of the soil ecosystem and how its composition changes over time.

Haven't heard of any gadgets that can measure that automatically

cannakis said:

Anyone use anything to test their microbial content? Especially a portable meter? I found a luminometer that's used in sanitation for like $1,250... I think that would be good to have in building soil from scratch with your own recipe and to measure if your tap water kills them when used.

Click to expand...

You could learn the effects of tap water on your soil biology by sending samples to a lab. Thrre are plenty of labs that measure the basics of soil biology. Pretty sure logan does and for sure Intlaglab does.

It seems like in general the sanitizing effect is overstated. The oxidizers used to sanitize water are easily inactivated by the volume of organic material in biological growing media. Flooding a pot with chlorinated water on a reg basis would kill off your herd i bet.

It would be nice to eliminate "the lab" though, hey?

1250$ is too much..

There must be a better way ..