All,
Here is a post that I made on another thread. GLK herp helped me do mine to. Only I live near him. He is an awesome guy and does great work. I currently have eggs in the incubator and I have the humidity at 85% consistently. These eggs are doing much better and the ones in the past. It really isn't that hard to do. PS George this thing is freaking amazing. I have tested it out in the garage in the winter and it still holds temperature!
First, the reason that I started this was because I was getting tired of using the Hovabator. While it worked I thought that it was to unreliable. I thought that I had to monitor the temperatures to much. When eggs were in the incubator in the summer it was almost impossible. Chicago weather goes up and down so fast and so much it just couldn't keep up with the changes.
So I started with a Wine cooler. I wanted something that was going to be larger than needed, reliable, and asthetically pleasing. I found one on craigs list for pretty cheap. I looked at it and it had everything I wanted. It sealed, had a light on a switch from the outside, and a temperature gauge. I only took a picture of the final product so here it is.
If you look closely at the picture you can see that the racks all are curved in the front. Well, that was the first thing that we did. I had to remove all the curved pieces in the middle. I did not remove the front piece cause I did not want to change the aspect of the rack. I welded in steal tubing to create the racks. First task was simple and only took 20 mins.
George did these steps for me.
Next was to turn this thing from cooling to heating. It was actually as simple as cutting the wires to the compressor to stop the cooling. This allowed the light and thermometor to continue to function. What a bonus.
The next couple pictures are of the heating element and the fan. I did lots of research in this area. At first I was going to get Heat tape. It was the most commonly used element to heat a home made incubator that I could find. But, when I talked to a local guy(GLK HERP) he suggested heat coil. I found that it heated faster, cooled faster, lasted longer, and was cheaper to purchase. The fan was also suggest by him because of the size of this incubator. The fan is run at full speed to move the air up the incubator a little quicker. It is a basic computer cooling fan.
So the final step in the product was getting the temperature controller. I needed something that was going to control and adjust. I didn't want a simple on off thing like the hovabator uses. The one I selected is a HerpstatND Digital Thermostat purchased from GLK. It has plenty of opitions. Many of which I won't use but the key ones are proportional control and alarm for when I hit specific temps. It lowers the voltage being applied to the heat coil when it reaches the temperature and raises the voltage when it is further away from the temperature. The nice part is that it tells what voltage, as a percentage, it is applying to the coil. I had the temperature set at 85.4. I will incubate at a slightly lower temperature. I tested at this temperature and set the alarm to go off at 86 degrees. The temperature only reached that on the initial warm up and then quickly droped into range.
The result is a Incubator that controlled the temperature in the basement and the variance over one week was never off by more than .2 degrees. I also noted it hit temperature and adjusted itself in under 2 min. That was amazing.
Ernie
Me too huh??? Take good care Jeff & Beth, B
