incubator ideas! post your ideas for home made incubators, whether they work or not~ - Page 23

Thanks I like how it looks too. : ) 

I only have two incubators, one for incubating and one for hatching. My first Igloo bator is for day 1-17 and has a cut down to fit auto-turner. It has two 40 watt bulbs for heat, GQF thermostat, computer fan, water filled jars as heat sinks and to keep humidity stable. I have a nightlight that stays on all the time in it so it helps stabilize temps. I like being able to add eggs whenever I want and stagger hatching.

Higher humidity and light bulbs scares me so, my second small igloo for hatching - had the crock pot heating element, GQF and a computer fan. I transfered the crock pot heating element, GQF and Plexiglas to this new hatcher bator. The rope/tube lighting is hooked up with the crock pot heating element and both are controlled by GQF. I put in the desk top fan because I thought a little bigger fan would be better. Now junk small igloo is a $3.00 lose but I got 22 chicks out of it.

I plan to add the now extra computer fan into igloo incubator when I don't have eggs in it but, it's has been in use since I made it and will be for awhile.

I'm sure the Bi-metal thermostat would work fine as that is what many crock pots have in them. I bought the two GQF's and a extra wafer to have on hand. so, I didn't use the Bi-metal thermostat from the crock pot  - I put it somewhere for safe keeping and now I can't find it 

Before I used the rope/tube lighting for hatcher - I had purchased a working but much older crock pot at a resale shop for $5.00 but when I took it apart - I found it had very fine wire wrapped up and down around the ceramic pot as the heating element and the thermostat  was part of the control knob. I took the wires off of the ceramic pot and wrapped it around and between two ceramic insulators and hooked it up for power in hatcher - but it just didn't put off much heat and the wires cooled too quickly. A $5.00 waste. That's when I remembered I had the rope/tube lights and it solved two problems : added heat and safe lighting to be able to see in.

My temp is stable at 99.5-100.0 deg but, I am having a problem getting humidity level up in this new hatcher   I have two cake pans 9"x11" and a 8"x8" filled with water in it and still only getting 43%

GQF Thermostats aren't real cheap at $20.00 to $25.00 but, they are easy to work with and they are suppose to last for years. The extra replacement wafer I bought for it was only $7.00.

We made an incubator about a month ago based on what we had seen here and it seems to be going okay.  My wife candled the eggs at day 11 and thinks we have 7 good prospects out of 15 eggs.  We purchased eggs on ebay that were shipped so I see almost 50% as pretty good.  I couldn't figure out how to make a page on the incubator page so it ended up as a comment on the coop page called the "Cheap o Bator".  Because I am what some call a raging dork I also have been recently playing with Arduino microcontrollers.  If you are not familiar it is a programable processor that can deal with several inputs and outputs.  They sell for about $30 at radioshack and are awesome if you fancy excessive technology.  Anyway, if we incubate more eggs, we will, then the incubator will be automated except for turning the eggs since that is too much fun.  A temp/humidity sensor with .1 degree and 3% accuracy can be bought for $10 and relays are cheap.  So if you think programming is fun or at least rewarding you can easily have true +- 1 degree and 5% control over your hatching environment for only $40-50 more then what your incubator was going to cost anyway, negating the need for a thermostat.  And if you play with the Arduino when you are not hatching you can write off the $30.  With a few controls you can have vents open and close, lights turn on and off, and water exposure all controlled.  If you are really serious about documenting data then you could also set it up to document temp and humidity every so often so you can figure out what works best.  Just a thought and if we go forward with this dorkiness I will be more then happy to make any programs written freely accessible.  

Good luck to every body else out there reinventing the wheel for what ever reason. 

Well that looks kind of cool  but, I don't think it would fit in mine  I've added a few mason jars of water and am up to 60%  so one more should get me up to 65% I hope.

The vaporizer looks like this, and can easily fit in a mason jar. The one I bought from Family Dollar, also has multicolored LED lights in it, so the inside of the incubator is lit up with color when this is on.

Ha ha. You don't have to use the whole bowl. There is a small water vaporizer in the bottom of the bowl. You just take the water vaporizer out, and you can put the vaporizer in a mason jar of water. 

I bought the whole misting fountain for 12 bucks at Family Dollar. I didn't want to spend that much, especially because I just wanted the vaporizer, but it has worked wonderfully.