Opinions on bulb wattage for homemade 'bators...

[Jaybr]

I used 2 100 watt bulbs in mine, thought being that I wanted it to heat up quick. As long as the thermostat works well and it doesn't overheat, I want it to get up to temps as fast as possible.

 

[bandm]

Actually, you can't compare the wattage of a bulb to the wattage of a heating element. The bulb is putting out a lot of the wattage as light, where the element is putting it out as heat. The element will start putting out heat faster than the bulb because it take a while for the light bulb to start heating.

bandm

 

[eggonomist]

While I agree with the theory, I want to know if my heat source stops working, it did before and took a little while to finally fail, during that time I couldn't understand what was going on, I finally swapped the heating element out for a lightbulb and saved some of the hatch. This would not of happened if i was using a light. Now I have an electronic thermostat that tells me if the heating element (whatever I use) fails so I feel more confident about using a heating element again, but for many a light works just fine.