Questions about building an incubator.

I plan to build an incubator out of a wine chiller. I want to use heat tape as the heat source but how do I calculate how much I need to achieve the correct temperature? The volume inside the wine chiller is about 8.65 cubic feet.

Thanks!

As far as an equation to calculate it I don't think we have anything adequate for that. It would be difficult to determine such an equation which would take into consideration the variables of the ambient temperature of the room it was in as well as the insulation capacity of the unit.
I would venture an educated guess however that 2 feet of 11" wide flexwatt would be plenty. This is based on an incubator I built from a 20 or 21 cubit foot freezer. I found that two feet would only raise the internal temperature to a maximum of 80 or so in the room I put it in, which has an average summertime temperature of 70-72. I ended up using four feet to achieve the desired temperature of 90 to hatch python eggs.

Two feet would probably be adequate for a wine cooler and allow a certain amount of overhead, meaning it would have the capability of overheating if not for the thermostat, which is the the preferred situation.

Like Clay said, this is hard to guess. The general rule of thumb for radiant room heat is one watt per cubic foot of space but this does not always translate to smaller spaces.

The biggest problem you'll have is dealing with the radiant heat which is what is primarily produced by heat tape. I know everyone thinks and assumes that heat rises, but this is not true. Only heated air rises and radiant heat does little to heat the air. As such, certains issues have to be accounted for when heating a space with a lot of interior volume.

The upshot of all this is that you can dramatically increase the heating efficiency of your heat source by adding thermal mass. The cheapest and most simple way is to add several gallon jugs of water sitting directly on or near the heat source. I have also used a broken "pizza stone" on the bottom of an incubator. I'm not a big fan of the water method due to the potential for disaster but in a pinch I have used heavier plastic bottles and the sealed Ultratherm heat pads. Many ceramic or porcelain tiles also work well and damaged ones can be found for free.

For my next incubator I actually plan to use scrap soapstone left over from stone countertop fabricators. Soapstone is considered to be just about the best thermal mass source due to it's ability to retain heat.

Hmmmm... Interesting. I though heat tape was the preferred method. Are there better options out there?

SVT Snake said:

Hmmmm... Interesting. I though heat tape was the preferred method. Are there better options out there?

Click to expand...

Just to clarify, what I mentioned above has nothing to do with heat tape, it has to do with increasing thermal mass inside of an incubator. Heat tape can still be used.

Oh, Okay. Yeah, I planned to use about four 2 liter bottles of water. I'm thinking that should be enough.

From the reading I've done and the very experienced people I've spoken to, the "Rule of Thumb" for heating any incubator is roughly 10 watts of heat for every cu. ft. of space to achieve a 20 degree ambient temperature increase (a room that is 70 degrees to heat the incubator up to 90 degrees in a resonable amount of time) (one hour). That means that for your 8.6 cu. ft. incubator, you would need 86 watts of heat or 4 panels (20 watts/foot, for a total of 80 watts) of 11" heat tape.