any success with homemade incubator?

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?

My temps are spot on with my home made one :)

what do you us? a bulb or heat pad?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I have a cooler set up as well. First clutch had 100% hatch rate. I used a Heat Cable and wrapped it around the bottom layer of PVC. I put egg crate (cut out the middle to zip tie a fan to it and placed my water bottles around the fan. My temps were 89-90 at all times.

You will probably find out that most people here have a homemade incubator.

It's really not hard to setup and can be done for a fraction of the cost of commercial incubators and easily twice as many clutches if not more.

Here is mine capable of holding (30) 7 quarts tubs or (10) 15 quarts + (10) 7 quarts tubs

http://i954.photobucket.com/albums/a...nIncubator.jpg

My cost: Black paint for the fridge, Proportional T-Stat (Herpstat) , Heat Tape , Egg boxes and light diffuse for the egg boxes, the fridge was free.

My very first incubator was a 120 quarts cooler.

I use a cooler from Safeway with heat tap wrapped around a dozen 0.5 liter bottles of water, controlled by a Vivarium Electronics thermostat. It held a rock-solid 89F for 61 days, and I now have a lavender albino male and 4 poss hets.

The trick is to spend the $150 on a good thermostat, use a well-insulated cooler, and make sure you have lots of water bottles.

(The water bottles increase the heat capacity, see. They're basically "heat inertia": it takes water a long time to cool down and a long time to heat up, so once they hit the correct temperature, the thermostat doesn't have to work very hard to maintain it, and any heat spikes from the electronics will be absorbed by the water.)

I did basically follow the DIY instructions on one of the stickies I found here. I didn't add a viewing window, however, because I figured that would be complicated, and would hurt the cooler's insulating ability.

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Originally Posted by Deborah

You will probably find out that most people here have a homemade incubator.

It's really not hard to setup and can be done for a fraction of the cost of commercial incubators and easily twice as many clutches if not more.

Here is mine capable of holding (30) 7 quarts tubs or (10) 15 quarts + (10) 7 quarts tubs

http://i954.photobucket.com/albums/a...nIncubator.jpg

My cost: Black paint for the fridge, Proportional T-Stat (Herpstat) , Heat Tape , Egg boxes and light diffuse for the egg boxes, the fridge was free.

My very first incubator was a 120 quarts cooler.

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next year I will be moving up to one just like yours Deborah since ill finally have all of my females up to weight which will be 22 females. which is going to put me over the limit for my 150 qt cooler