any success with homemade incubator?

[eddy350]

hi, Ive been using a friend's incubator and was tthinking of getting or making my own. has anyone had success maintaining the correct temperature in a homemade incubator?

[llovelace]

My temps are spot on with my home made one

[eddy350]

what do you us? a bulb or heat pad?

[snake lab]

I would venture to say that 80% of people use homemade incubators because for what it costs to buy a big enough incubator to incubate a number of clutches you can build 3 of them. Its pretty basic. Heat source,fan, thermostat. I would use a heat source other then bulbs. Flexwatt i think works best. I used to use 2 incubators made out of a glass front coke coolers but i needed more room so i turned a walk in closet into a walk in incubator by using an oil filled heater as my heat source, an electronics fan that runs all the time and a glass door. It works perfect and i can incubate 100 clutches or more at a time with excellent success

[Blue Apple Herps]

Yup, cooler incubator here. Use flexwatt, if you don't want to wire it up, Reptile Basics can do it for you. I have two strips of 4" flexwatt in the bottom of a big cooler. On top is a layer of plastic water bottles with water (temp stabilizer), and a piece of plastic light grid on top of that.

Works perfectly. Make sure you run a high quality thermostat though (Herpstat, etc). You want steady temps.

[Adam Chandler]

I think a better question would be "has anyone not had any success with homemade incubator?"

Homemade incubators tend to be very reliable and effective. My homemade Redbull incubator maintains it's temps evenly throughout. I have not had any problems with it.

The key materials are a old cooler/refrigerator (anything designed to hold temps) a nice proportional thermostat and some heat tape.

[eddy350]

thanks for your help guys. ill give it a shot before I put a clutch in it.

[mr.spooky]

i use a stand up coke cooler (with the glass door). the seems like i paid a buck fifty for it,,, the compressor dident work, but i dident need that anyway.. i used the fan that was in it. i put 11" flexwatt on the back wall. and then made a false wall on the back (about 2 inches off the flexwatt).. i also made a false wall from the fan (thats on inside top) and fixed it to the false wall in back so the fan pulls air from the incubator, goes through the false wall, and out at 1/2" x 11" slits that i made at every shelf in the system. its controles by a spyder robotics herpstat praportional thermostat. in the bottom of the unit, i put a large sterlite tub filled with water and used a small fish tank aireator (sp?) that produces perfect humidity in the incubator.. BTW,,, the incubator also holds perfect temps as well!!!!!!
spooky

[mr.spooky]

forgot to mention that the false wall was made from the styrofoam that my T 10's were packedged in.
spooky

[BallsUnlimited]

i use a cooler with a with a large heat pad connected to a herp stat and bottled water. maintains what ever temp i need it to and have absolutely no problems hatching babies.