Their Other Mother - You are thinking about the heater. The heater is the long flat rubber-looking thingy. It's about 12 inches wide, and two to three feet long. The thermostat is the controller that is secured to the outside of the bed with the dial on it, and usually a red light to indicate when the heater is on. The heater plugs into the thermostat, and then the thermostat plugs into the wall outlet.
You could always roll up one end of the heater, and place a wire cage around it; both to keep it from unrolling, and to keep the babies from getting inside the roll and getting stuck. You would also need to put sand over on top of the heater in the brooder cage. The sand will act as a heat sink, keeping warm, but the babies wouldn't get burned as easily, not to mention scratching and pecking at it, and possibly getting electrocuted. But I think, with the right safeguards, it would work real well.
I was thinking about running one of the heaters around three of the sides of the bator, with hardware cloth spaced out in front an inch or two to keep the chicks from pecking it, or getting burned. Hubby was thinking about running it down underneath the eggs, and up one or both sides, also with some hardware cloth to keep the babies from getting hurt.
As for the range of the thermostat, mine runs from down in the 70's to about 120 degrees. Ours is marked for every two degrees, so it SHOULD be a lot simpler to adjust to a much smaller range than the HWH thermostats. With the probe being about two feet long, you could just about place it anywhere you wanted to. Wonder if you could put That Probe inside a water wiggler with the thermometer probe to regulate when it turns on and off??
Sticks22 - I'd look for one in the second-hand stores, and failing there, would go to the furniture stores. Any of the ones that sell/sold waterbeds would have all the accessories. We had to replace our liner and heater about 18 months ago, and found one no problem.
MissPrissy - Any opinions on how this would work best?
Kathy
