DIY Laminar Flow Hood
Updated July 17, 2023
We did a test with a DIY flow hood and some agar plates and have come to the conclusion that a still air box is likely safer to use. Unless you really know what you’re doing, don’t make your own flow hood, just buy one.
These things are pretty expensive to buy out right, but they can be built for substantially less money at home. As usual this comes with a sacrifice in quality. If you decide to forego the flow hood, please do use a still air box.
There’s a variety of videos that can show you how to do this, we’re linking one below
We like this video because it demonstrates how this is good, but it’s not trying to pretend that it’s perfect. That seems to be how a lot of this works, we shouldn’t expect any one of our safety measures to be perfect. But if we stack enough of them up on top of each other, we can have a reasonable certainty that we have successfully created a sterile product.
It’s like Swiss cheese. With any single slice there are holes in it that you can see through. But if you take enough of those slices and stack them up on top of each other eventually you have a solid chunk of cheese.