Emissivity is a measure of a material’s ability to emit infrared energy. I remembered learning about it in a construction article promoting a highly reflective foil covering the building insulation to provide low emissivity and keep thermal transfer between the interior and exterior to a minimum.

I never had a ton of success rigging an incubation chamber with the thermostatic heat pad in the sterilite tub covered in towels/blankets. The heating would be very uneven throughout the chamber, and more often than not I’d be accidentally baking my spawn if the pad was in contact with anything in the tub, even with towels to help insulate.

So I decided to go overboard and focus on a tub with very low interior emissivity, and inversely a high thermal reflectivity. So I decided to quite literally adhere shiny aluminum foil to the interior of my tub using spray flex seal, and position my heating pad coiled in a small plastic enclosure with lots of holes for emitting heated air on one side of the tub, with all my jars/spawn on the opposite side of the tub.

The results were very encouraging; not only did the tub heat up A LOT faster, but the temperature throughout the chamber was much more even and provided more space for jars/bags than my usual tub with blankets/towels for insulating. I know this is not new info by any means, countless travel size coolers implement similar techniques to keep food the proper temperature for longer.

Just thought I’d share, happy growing & good luck with your experiments!