My younger sister in grade 6 has a science fair coming up on April 13th (yay procrastination). Being the big brother, best friend forever (my little pony reference) it became my job to help her come up with an idea for a project. She insisted that she wants to create something she can play with or use after the competition is over. After jostling through different ideas that didn’t even qualify for that category.. eureka!!! Why not build an incubator that we will use for our own ball python eggs cometh breeding time next year.

She wants to build it from scratch so picnic coolers or broken fridges aren’t an option. We watched this video and she really liked it and wanted to do something similar.

Some of the questions I still have:

1) is the purpose of water bottles on the heat tape simply for better heat diffusion?

2) We will be going for a shorter but wider build, how necessary is a small pc fan? (Is there any reason to use a fan other than breaking up uneven heat concentrations (forgot the scientific word)?

3) from your experience, having built a DIY incubator or not, what would you do differently? What did you wish you knew? What do you think most incubators lack?

We’ll be starting the build later today or early tomorrow and I will update this thread with pictures and steps as we go