This latest hatch has about convinced me to keep my incubator plugged into an uninterruptable power supply. Two power failures! The first one was the day after I moved the eggs into the hatching trays which lasted for forty minutes. Box temp fell to 92. Second one was today and lasted four hours. Fortunately all but the stragglers had hatched and it was 94 outside so the brooder chicks never even noticed except for it being a bit dark under the hover. Ended up taking the last batch of hatched chicks out of the incubator before I had planned on it as I was becoming concerned that with the fan being off they might eventually smother since I had about a dozen hatched and dry. It's proving to be a stormy summer so when we start hatching again in August I expect it'll happen again which has got me to thinking about a UPS. Anyone use one with your incubator?
Yes, you better believe I have my incubator on a UPS. I live in the suburbs of Detroit, and our local utility DTE Energy is notorious bad about line maintenance and slow to respond after storms, and we have a lot of violent storms here (Friday night, the post office about 1.5 miles from my house lost 5 or 6 big trees in their parking lot, just smashed to pieces by storm winds, but nothing but a few small twigs down at my house). I had one that I bought a few years ago for around $100 for my desktop computer. It could run the computer, 19" monitor, and a laserjet or deskjet printer for almost an hour (believe me, I've tested it during power outages), and I once ran a lamp with a small cfc bulb on it for almost 40 hours, and a fan one time for about 10 hours during another power outage. So, I figure it will run my Brinsea Octagon Advance (25 watts running, 45 watts peak plus 3 watts for the automatic turner motor) for at least 10 or 12 hours easy, if not more. I haven't even turned on the desktop computer in like 2 years, I just use my laptops, so it was an easy decision just to steal this UPS from the computer desk. But, if I hadn't already had this UPS, I would have bought one, since it's springtime/early summer and I know we're likely to have bad storms and those 2-3-4 day blackouts thanks to that dynamic duo, Mother Nature and old DTE Energy. I've also got 2 of those Black and Decker Emergency Power Stations with 110 volt outlets on them, which are kept charged and ready. All of this will buy me time until I can get my generators up and running ( 3 of those, total of 21,000 watts output) in the event of an outage. As long as I can get gasoline from somewhere, ultimately I can keep my three freezers, my well pump, and the incubator going during an extended outage.
