Does anyone know how to make an incubator easy enough for a kid to mak

[sangel4you]

yay!!! Do you know how big the dimensions are of your cooler and is a 25 watt enough? Also, what did you hook the bulb to, to get it powered?

 

[sangel4you]

How did it go?! Our pullet finally started laying so now I REALLY want to know how this is working because we want to hatch some RIR/WLcross!!!! LOL

 

[sangel4you]

I have to say I'm a little bummed about not getting a response here....DS and I were going to try it until I couldnt find out if it ever worked with success :-(

 

[Cherlyn]

Definitely send Emilys3guppies a PM - she is super-active on here and I am sure she would love to let you know how it turned out!

~Cherlyn

 

[vyshtia]

I was originally going to make my own incubator, but after extensive research, I found out that the homemade incubators could end up costing you more money and headache than it's worth. Already, there are incubators that you can buy that don't end up working well and you get poor to no hatches - when you make your own...and you want it to be super simple - you run even more risks. If you spend a lot of money on eggs that don't hatch, then it's a big waste of money, time, and energy. It seems like the best homemade incubators are the ones that people put a lot more work into - more work that I'm willing to put into (since I'm not that good at making things)...so in the end - it was easier for me to spend the $120.00 on a Hovabator 1588 incubator off ebay. After a few days, I invested in the automatic egg turner as well. At first, I wanted to turn all the eggs myself - but it got old real quick and made me stress out when I was at work/busy and couldn't get to the eggs. Also - although they only need to be turned 3 times in a 24 hr period, it's best if they are turned a LOT more often. I'm VERY happy with the purchase of the automatic egg turner - it took a big worry off my shoulders.

There are sooo many things that can go wrong when incubating eggs - the issues with bad incubators are temperature spikes and humidity fluctuations. Shipped eggs can have lower hatch rate due to the stress of being shipped/bad handling. Fertility, strength of the egg itself, parents, temperatures exposed, humidity, etc, etc...there is a LOT that affects hatch rate...especially when in nature that hatch rate is 50-65%. A great incubator can raise that to 75-100% - and then you subtract for every stress and variant factor that the egg faced. So my personal choice was to go ahead and just buy a good incubator and take that 1 huge variant factor out of the equation to raise my hatch rate.

Now, I'm not trying to discourage you from building your own. I'm forever wishing I was more handy like the others here on BYC who are able to make their own everythings and have it work well for them! I'm just putting in my own two cents on what my thought process was when I was trying to figure out if I should make one or buy one myself.

It seems like that minimum that a good incubator needs to have is:
1. styrofoam/cooler type material for the body
2. hole cut out on the top for the light bulb for heat source (light bulbs installed on side can take up valuable space, burn chicks, uneven heating)
3. water for humidity (best if put in a shallow tray on bottom than a cup filled with water - humidity depends on surface area of water - sometimes rags/sponges work, but you may have to re-wet them...best to design a way to rewet them without opening incubator.
4. wire bottom
5. computer fan (forced air seems to have better results than still fan - eggs need good ventilation)

Everything on this list seems to be easy enough until I got the computer fan part. You can buy these fans for pretty cheap at computer stores, radio shack, etc...but I don't know how to wire up a computer fan. It's probably easy enough... but oh well...I don't need to worry about that anymore! lol Do a search for "homemade incubator", "DIY incubator" and you should find lots of pictures...

I would recommend an egg turner as well.

Good luck!!
Dawn.

 

[Grey Bird Farm]

I made the Miss Prissy Incubator from this site. It was easy and successful. A great experience all around.
I'd recommend it.