Kiraeh
Songster
So, after looking at the incubators available at my price point for the number of eggs I wanted to hatch, and the reviews about how unreliable the cheaper styro ones are, I decided to try my hand at making one myself. Here's what I did and how it went:
I started with your standard Styrofoam cooler, light bulb, dimmer switch combo. I cut a hole in the top and taped a double layer of greenhouse plastic across the hole. Then I cut a square out of the corner of the top layer, because I couldn't see through two layers to the thermometer.
Before I put the eggs in, I ran it empty for a while at max power on the dimmer switch. I dug two ventilation holes on the three sides without a light, lower on the short sides and higher on the long, and gradually enlarged them until the empty, max heat incubator was running ~100 at the base. I think that maximizing my ventilation like that was extremely helpful for preventing temp spikes, even though the eggs ended up sitting a bit higher than that and still could have been cooked on a hot day. I was able to compensate for all that ventilation quite well in the end, and I had no real issues with humidity.
With that set, I covered the bottom of the cooler with a couple inches of beach sand, for thermal mass. A piece of hardware cloth, folded over to avoid poky edges in the Styrofoam, went on top, sitting a few inches above that, snug in the slanted sides of the cooler.
The thermometer was positioned where I could see it, and I started out with the eggs neatly arranged but pretty soon I gave up on that, and I think it was a good thing. Clustering the eggs together in the middle avoided any being stuck in cool spots, and left me plenty of room to stick a cup of water in there any time I felt paranoid about humidity.
So to control temperature I had the dimmer switch, which I babied carefully the whole time, getting up in the middle of the night, calling home on my work break to get my family to check it. A few days in we had some cold weather, and I threw a sheepskin over the top, as full light wasn't doing enough. That was a great addition and stabilized the temperature a lot, letting my dial down the dimmer a full third of the way by preventing heat loss through the viewing window and the seam of the lid, which was not tight as the hardware cloth was pushing the sides of the cooled outwards a bit.
When I got to lockdown, I made a few upgrades: I switched the greenhouse plastic for an acrylic pane from a cheap picture frame, and I put some drawer liner on the hardware cloth. I put some Tupperware on the sand underneath it full of water.
I wasn't getting humidity quite where I wanted, so I soon added more containers above the Tupperware too. I added the foil around the lightbulb to make it more gentle on tiny chick eyes. I burned a hole in the lid doing that, and taped the light into a better position. I patched the hole. Every time I opened the incubator, after lockdown started, I poured some warm water on the sand to boost the humidity. It stayed over 70% most of the time, and never dropped below 60%.
Turning: I turned 3x on day one, then about every two hours when I was at home and awake until day 14, making sure to alternate sides for any time it would be longer than 2hr. This ended up being about 5-9 times most days. After day 14 I turned a bit less until we went to lockdown. I washed my hands carefully every single time.
Candling: I candled about half the eggs every day. I rarely turned eggs without candling one of them. If something happened, I wanted to know as soon as possible.
Humidity: I decided on a dry hatch, with the research I did it seemed better and the ambient humidity was mostly appropriate for it. If it went down to 20, I'd put a cup with water in the incubator. I weighed each egg before setting them and again three times during incubation, and relied on that more than worrying about what the humidity meter said from day to day- although I doubled checked the accuracy of my thermometer, I never bothered salt testing the hygrometer.
Advantages to the coolerbator:
Because it's so roomy, I found it handled being opened all the time pretty well. I didn't follow lockdown rules particularly closely, and opened it over and over during hatching to remove chicks and shells, to assist a few times(probably none of them needed it haha, but I did learn a lot)
Disadvantages: with manual temperature control, you have to be prepared to mother hen it constantly to keep it steady. I did it and I pulled it off, but I lost a lot of sleep and I relied on family who were willing to help when I wasn't home. Not everyone can do that. Tho, most people probably have access to a more stable indoor temperature than I do, I live in an old drafty farmhouse with three dogs and two cats, and the basement is unfinished and hard to access.
Mistakes I made:
I didn't sterilize my sand. I got away with it but it's something I absolutely should have done.
I misjudged my temperature. My thermometer was accurate, but lying where it was I knew it wasn't measuring the temperature at the top of the eggs. I estimated that the sensor was at the middle of the eggs, and with the poor view I had until lockdown, decided I'd aim for 100° since it would at least be easy to see- 100, 101, and 99 are visually distinct, 99 and 98, 95,96, really it was hard through my murky view to tell most of the 90s apart.
As a result, I ran hot and hatched early.
Got lucky: I got great eggs. Local flock, all fertile, farm serious about biosecurity, they were dipped to sterilize the shells, no sign of any deficiencies in any of the chicks. I had no quitters, just two DIS after lockdown.
The two DIS: these two eggs, something was off about them that I noticed around day ten. I even mentioned it in my candling thread. They were developing, but idk. There was something murky about them. A bit less movement. When I started lockdown, they were alive but the only ones that weren't in pipping position already. And they never did- the air cell drew down to basically shrinkwrap them without the shell even being cracked. I should have eggtopsied them properly, all I did was open the shell enough to see that. I don't know what was up, to have the same thing happen to them both. Maybe they were just a bit worse positioned and got affected by a temperature fluctuation, maybe I handled them too roughly at some point- I was careful but it's possible. If anyone knows what causes this, I'd love to find out.
My candling thread:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/bunch-of-candling-development-pics.1386101/
For next time: I'd like to add auto temp control. If I do that, it would be perfect, and at this point I can do that for about as much as I paid to set it up(~$80 CAD). Ideally, I'd like separate sensor for light and fan, so if one fails there's less of a chance it'll become catastrophic before I can correct it. One fan on vents to turn on for cooling, one permanent so I don't have still air to deal with. I don't need an auto turner, turning is no trouble to me.
I'd like to line the whole thing, maybe with that greenhouse plastic, and tighten up the seal on the lid. Put tubes in the vent holes so I have the option of plugging them, seal it up with waterproof or thermal tape.
Just rocks instead of sand, sand is proving to be a huge pain to clean out.
They love climbing up on that thermometer, they were up there all the time haha.
Have you built your own incubator? Big or small, cardboard box or custom cabinet, what worked and what didn't? Show off your builds!
I started with your standard Styrofoam cooler, light bulb, dimmer switch combo. I cut a hole in the top and taped a double layer of greenhouse plastic across the hole. Then I cut a square out of the corner of the top layer, because I couldn't see through two layers to the thermometer.
Before I put the eggs in, I ran it empty for a while at max power on the dimmer switch. I dug two ventilation holes on the three sides without a light, lower on the short sides and higher on the long, and gradually enlarged them until the empty, max heat incubator was running ~100 at the base. I think that maximizing my ventilation like that was extremely helpful for preventing temp spikes, even though the eggs ended up sitting a bit higher than that and still could have been cooked on a hot day. I was able to compensate for all that ventilation quite well in the end, and I had no real issues with humidity.
With that set, I covered the bottom of the cooler with a couple inches of beach sand, for thermal mass. A piece of hardware cloth, folded over to avoid poky edges in the Styrofoam, went on top, sitting a few inches above that, snug in the slanted sides of the cooler.
The thermometer was positioned where I could see it, and I started out with the eggs neatly arranged but pretty soon I gave up on that, and I think it was a good thing. Clustering the eggs together in the middle avoided any being stuck in cool spots, and left me plenty of room to stick a cup of water in there any time I felt paranoid about humidity.
So to control temperature I had the dimmer switch, which I babied carefully the whole time, getting up in the middle of the night, calling home on my work break to get my family to check it. A few days in we had some cold weather, and I threw a sheepskin over the top, as full light wasn't doing enough. That was a great addition and stabilized the temperature a lot, letting my dial down the dimmer a full third of the way by preventing heat loss through the viewing window and the seam of the lid, which was not tight as the hardware cloth was pushing the sides of the cooled outwards a bit.
When I got to lockdown, I made a few upgrades: I switched the greenhouse plastic for an acrylic pane from a cheap picture frame, and I put some drawer liner on the hardware cloth. I put some Tupperware on the sand underneath it full of water.
I wasn't getting humidity quite where I wanted, so I soon added more containers above the Tupperware too. I added the foil around the lightbulb to make it more gentle on tiny chick eyes. I burned a hole in the lid doing that, and taped the light into a better position. I patched the hole. Every time I opened the incubator, after lockdown started, I poured some warm water on the sand to boost the humidity. It stayed over 70% most of the time, and never dropped below 60%.
Turning: I turned 3x on day one, then about every two hours when I was at home and awake until day 14, making sure to alternate sides for any time it would be longer than 2hr. This ended up being about 5-9 times most days. After day 14 I turned a bit less until we went to lockdown. I washed my hands carefully every single time.
Candling: I candled about half the eggs every day. I rarely turned eggs without candling one of them. If something happened, I wanted to know as soon as possible.
Humidity: I decided on a dry hatch, with the research I did it seemed better and the ambient humidity was mostly appropriate for it. If it went down to 20, I'd put a cup with water in the incubator. I weighed each egg before setting them and again three times during incubation, and relied on that more than worrying about what the humidity meter said from day to day- although I doubled checked the accuracy of my thermometer, I never bothered salt testing the hygrometer.
Advantages to the coolerbator:
Because it's so roomy, I found it handled being opened all the time pretty well. I didn't follow lockdown rules particularly closely, and opened it over and over during hatching to remove chicks and shells, to assist a few times(probably none of them needed it haha, but I did learn a lot)
Disadvantages: with manual temperature control, you have to be prepared to mother hen it constantly to keep it steady. I did it and I pulled it off, but I lost a lot of sleep and I relied on family who were willing to help when I wasn't home. Not everyone can do that. Tho, most people probably have access to a more stable indoor temperature than I do, I live in an old drafty farmhouse with three dogs and two cats, and the basement is unfinished and hard to access.
Mistakes I made:
I didn't sterilize my sand. I got away with it but it's something I absolutely should have done.
I misjudged my temperature. My thermometer was accurate, but lying where it was I knew it wasn't measuring the temperature at the top of the eggs. I estimated that the sensor was at the middle of the eggs, and with the poor view I had until lockdown, decided I'd aim for 100° since it would at least be easy to see- 100, 101, and 99 are visually distinct, 99 and 98, 95,96, really it was hard through my murky view to tell most of the 90s apart.
As a result, I ran hot and hatched early.
Got lucky: I got great eggs. Local flock, all fertile, farm serious about biosecurity, they were dipped to sterilize the shells, no sign of any deficiencies in any of the chicks. I had no quitters, just two DIS after lockdown.
The two DIS: these two eggs, something was off about them that I noticed around day ten. I even mentioned it in my candling thread. They were developing, but idk. There was something murky about them. A bit less movement. When I started lockdown, they were alive but the only ones that weren't in pipping position already. And they never did- the air cell drew down to basically shrinkwrap them without the shell even being cracked. I should have eggtopsied them properly, all I did was open the shell enough to see that. I don't know what was up, to have the same thing happen to them both. Maybe they were just a bit worse positioned and got affected by a temperature fluctuation, maybe I handled them too roughly at some point- I was careful but it's possible. If anyone knows what causes this, I'd love to find out.
My candling thread:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/bunch-of-candling-development-pics.1386101/
For next time: I'd like to add auto temp control. If I do that, it would be perfect, and at this point I can do that for about as much as I paid to set it up(~$80 CAD). Ideally, I'd like separate sensor for light and fan, so if one fails there's less of a chance it'll become catastrophic before I can correct it. One fan on vents to turn on for cooling, one permanent so I don't have still air to deal with. I don't need an auto turner, turning is no trouble to me.
I'd like to line the whole thing, maybe with that greenhouse plastic, and tighten up the seal on the lid. Put tubes in the vent holes so I have the option of plugging them, seal it up with waterproof or thermal tape.
Just rocks instead of sand, sand is proving to be a huge pain to clean out.
They love climbing up on that thermometer, they were up there all the time haha.
Have you built your own incubator? Big or small, cardboard box or custom cabinet, what worked and what didn't? Show off your builds!
. Eventually I gave up and put the fan right in the middle opposite the light, and pulled the sheepskin to hang down loosely over the side, far enough to dull the drafts. Gets me to less than a degree between sides, good enough for me. I'll rotate eggs from the hot end to the cool end whenever I turn em, no problemo.
