Looking for an incubator...

[Edwards' East of Eden]

Ha. An older male is an "old geezer",, with a long eeeee sound, usually said either fondly or dismissively, rarely in between. A geyser is with a long "eye", like you see with, sound, and is a hot, steamy water plume from the ground, like Old Faithful at Yellowstone Park.

http://geology.com/articles/geyser.shtml Woohoo! Sharing vocabulary around the world!

 

[al6517]

Quote:
there are many many manufactures. A smaller 'bator eh.. Have you considered a Brisnea or an LG?

Are you actually going to recommend this person buy an LG incubator, LOL what have they ever done to you to deserve such abuse.
OK So OP just for a reality check....... don't ever, ever buy a made in CHINA LG junk box, now I am doing you a favor. Good luck with your search.

 

[speedy2020]

Go with Hoverbator or Brinsea.

 

[Lightfoote]

Quote:
I built my own incubator - a large size cabinet style, and have tinkered continuously over the past 3+ months with variables to achieve and consistently maintain proper incubating temperature and relative humidity levels. It works,and with a little bit of recent fine-tuning, I have found the proper combination to do those things.

If you want, you can PM me, we can exchange emails, then I can send you digital pics of the construction process, and describe my "playing" with temp and humidity levels, and offer some relatively low-tech ideas. It's all up to you.

Lightfoote

 

[Edwards' East of Eden]

Lightfoote, I'd like to see your plans, too! Have you put it up on your BYC page or anywhere?

 

[Lightfoote]

I uploaded and shared photos of the step-by-step build process on a thread a couple of months back. I think I removed many of those pics when I uploaded photos of my hatching chicks five weeks ago, but I can easily attach and send them in an email if you want to PM me with your email address. I'll also check to see if I have any pic of the 'bator left in my uploads, and if so, I'll post them to this thread.

Lightfoote

 

[sumi]

Thank you, Lightfoote, I will do that!
Update: I've looked at some thermostats for geysers (water heaters) in a nearby, bigger town today. They got one that you can set from 50fahr to 140fahr. Now, I don't know how many degrees the thing'll drop before it starts up again... But it's better than what I've found so far, which either went up to 93 max or started at 104.
Edward's East of Eden: I'm going to check out your video also and I'm going to get by electrician round to come look at everything I got from you guys and see what he says. We should be able to do something with all this now!
Thank you for your advice etc. You guys are great

 

[sumi]

Quote:
there are many many manufactures. A smaller 'bator eh.. Have you considered a Brisnea or an LG?

Are you actually going to recommend this person buy an LG incubator, LOL what have they ever done to you to deserve such abuse.
OK So OP just for a reality check....... don't ever, ever buy a made in CHINA LG junk box, now I am doing you a favor. Good luck with your search.

Thanks, I guess?
Don't ever buy a made in South Africa inverter either. They are rubbish and the come without guarantees. The Chinese ones work very well.

 

[Lightfoote]

Edwards' East of Eden :

Lightfoote, I'd like to see your plans, too! Have you put it up on your BYC page or anywhere?

Well, we're in luck - I had not deleted the majority of the pics, so I'll put up a few:

Lightfoote​

 

[Lightfoote]

I have changed a couple of things that are not shown, but you can see all the basic features. Outside dimensions of the cabinet are 38"L x 38"H x 24"D - or, since I think S. Africa uses metric - about 1m L x 1m H x .65m D

Initially I used an old waterbed mattress heating pad, but it was nowhere near as accurate as I wanted. I went to the porcelain socket with an incandescent bulb as a heat source. I first used a 100w bulb, and frankly had to do quite a lot of fine tuning to keep the temperature in an acceptable range through the heating up/cooling down phases. You need to be as close as possible to 99.5 F, and the less variation, the better. I managed to get a successful, healthy hatch, though.

Just a day or two later, the 100w bulb burned out. I replaced it with my backup - a Phillips 75w true daylight soft white bulb - and tweaked the (water heater or geyser as you call it...) lower element thermostat a couple of times.

Magic! A constant temp with limited variations staying between 98.6 F and 100.3 F!

I currently have 23 eggs in it, though the top left drawer would hold close to 50 if I arranged them more tightly. I could also add at least another three such incubating/hatching drawers/shelves to the cabinet, just on the left side of the partition alone.

Lightfoote