Susan Skylark
Songster
Just when I thought I had run out of exciting hatching experiments, the temps crashed and made me get creative. You’d think a house thermostat set to 70F would maintain a steady temp year round for the most part, at least in a room with only one window, no external doors, and decent insulation. Not so much. While our rental snake (we snake sat for 2 years) did fine in that corner, the thermometers inside the incubator disagreed. Even turning up the incubator temp couldn’t keep up with an outside temp of -20F plus a bitter windchill. Apparently there are microclimates within a house, at least during extreme temperatures. An incubator, a snake habitat, a green house, a terrarium are all their own little microclimates but so too are the various nooks and crannies in which they are kept, hence the prohibition on drafts, sunlight, low ambient temp, etc. But even in a draft free corner, you still need to be vigilant. I have a little plastic bubble incubator with a styrofoam Box to set it in but that wasn’t enough, my thermometers were saying it was 98 or even a bit lower, since I always put on an ugly sweatshirt in this weather, why not the incubator? I didn’t have one of those hand knitted incubator cozies but a couple pairs of old flannel pjs did the trick and brought the temp up to 100F without raising the incubator setting. Last summer I had to be careful not to let the temp get too high. The house thermostat never changed, apparently they are in league with built in incubator thermometers and tend to fib! So have some extra thermometers and keep a close eye on them, no matter what the incubator or thermostat tell you!
