• Responding to email notices you receive.
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    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

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    Posted 08/15/2025
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    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

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    Addendum: 01/10/2026
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    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

Egg Disaster.. Mini Fridge users Read!

If you're in an area with bad power (low/high voltage) and/or lose power frequntly, look into a UPS/battery backup. They are primarily for computers, but will work with anything that plugs into them and that doesn't exceed the voltage/wattage. They generally start at $50ish and go up, but might be worth the investment.

Staples UPS
 
Could the problem be that these newer incubators are using proportional thermostats? Proportional might be fine for the heat source, but what about the fans. Motors don't tend to like changes in power and I would think this could cause problems over time.

The incubator we have is a DIY made from a wine cooler. It has worked extremely well. We used two Johnson Control thermostats, one to control the incubator and the other as a back up in case the first does something crazy or quits. Johnsons are on/off not proportional. Our collection has increased such that we need more incubators or a larger one. A couple of the new ones I've seen on the forum here suggest plugging them into a Herpstat or I suppose you could use a Helix both of which are proportional. I'm a little leary of using a proportional thermostat on an incubator if it has fans for the above reasons.

Clay, you made mention that proportional thermostats aren't good for incubators. Is this why or are there other reasons as well.

The heat source on our incubator is a little different. We use the thermoelectric unit to heat instead of cool by switching the polarity. People said it wouldn't work but it works extremely well. I don't think it would work too well on a larger unit, but I'm not sure.

I don't really want to get into a discussion of that in this thread. I'm just concerned about thermostats at this point.
 
I have my incubators plugged into a good proportional thermostat (the primary one). I then plug the primary thermostat into a secondary thermostat with a simple on/off function and set that a few degrees higher than the primary. Never had a problem, and fortunately I don't live in area with a lot of power surges or outages I don't think.

I use a secondary on/off thermostat for my space heater as well. Just make sure it can handle the wattage.
 
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