Homemade Incubators

[Sweet T]

Thanks for the reply, that definitely makes sense!

 

[Dianne88]

I made 2 of these and had to hand turn them 3 times a day. I used a 15w bulb and a dimmer to adjust the temp. I had a little jar of water and added a sponge during lockdown to raise the humidity. This worked really well and I had a good hatch rate.

 

[silkielover5]

added the trays and my dad came up with the great idea of running a pole through the trays and out the top so I can turn them without opening the incubator

 

[silkielover5]

 

[silkielover5]

Is that the

I believe they are to act as a heat sink to keep heat fluctuations more stable and on my homemade incubators I lift the lid off one more of them to add humidity for lockdown or ? I have 3 glass ones in the bottom of mine and they work great. I use tubes at the top of my incubator to refill them during lockdown without opening the unit. Works great.

same reason people put water bottles on the bottoms?

 

[Ankron]

 

[Ankron]

almost there!

 

[t0m]

I started a new thread but I should have posted here instead so here goes. I built a smoker controller last year and tried it out last week for my DIY incubator. It governs a 12V supply that powers a PC fan and the heating element (a 6.8 ohm power resistor). The box is just a styrofoam cooler with a clear plastic box duct taped into a hole in the lid -- totally disposable.





Blog post: http://smokedprojects.blogspot.com/2013/06/pid-controlled-egg-incubator.html

 

[t0m]

Well I've been having problems calibrating the temperature in this here incubator. I tried the ball-of-clay trick and measured with a digital medical thermometer and a Thermapen, both of which should be pretty accurate, and which tended to agree with each other to within 0.5*F. But although the thermometers agreed with each other, the temperature of the clay ball itself varied hugely, from as low as 96°F to as high as 102°F. Eventually I realized that the middle of the incubator was much warmer than close to the walls. The box clearly isn't sufficiently well insulated and it's a problem. I candled last night (day 6) and could only see one embryo out of 11 eggs, although most of them are brown so I'm not 100% sure for some of them. There might be a couple of yolkers in there, these eggs are from a farm with 2 roosters and maybe 60 chickens and weren't sold as hatching eggs.

 

[ktuvam]

Wow...love the ideals for DIY incubators. I have been making my own for the last 3 years using flex watt. Every year I work on making the bigger and better one. I still don't have much ideas in building turners but I seem many great ideas on here. I also purchased an incukit but not set it up yet. By fall- I should have about three incubators completed.

Had to add a power adjuster to the fan on this one...the fan speed was like a tornado in there. Lol