Using wood pellets in my oyster mushroom growing buckets - must I soak them first?

Hi there, i've got a mushroom bed in the garden (we'll see how it goes in a few months) and now starting to look at growing indoors. I like the bucket method. The tutorials I read used sawdust and soaked it overnight in hot water to contaminate and keep moist, before adding to the bucket with mycelium.
I'm wondering if using wood pellets  I would need to soak them too? Now that i'm writing this it seems like a silly question but I want to be certain.
Also - anyone tried buckets with sawdust/ wood pellets? How did it go?
Thanks!

You definitely need to soak the pellets to fluff them up and hydrate them, but it's generally not necessary to use hot water. The pellets are sterilized due to the heat of forming them. Oysters are generally aggressive enough to outcompete any tiny amount of contamination left on them.

Thank you Nick!
Can you advise me on how long to soak them? Over night? Sorry for the questions i'm a noob Really want to get everything right.
Thanks

I add a roughly equal amount of water by weight, mix it up, and just let it hydrate until it's all soaked up and fluffed up. Maybe mix a time or two during the process. Takes and hour or two maybe?

With wood pellets and oysters is there a certain type of wood pellets you need to use or can you use any compressed wood pellets?

Matt Fothergill wrote:With wood pellets and oysters is there a certain type of wood pellets you need to use or can you use any compressed wood pellets?

Oysters will grow on just about anything (people grow them on phone books with literally no supplemental nutrients). Hardwood will give faster growth and higher yields than softwoods, but you can grow them on any wood pellets.