New incubator.

[Clint Bundy]

Got this today. 50 bucks was a great price. Now I just have to wire the insides and get the flexwatt heat tape and a VE300 to run it. I plan on doing a circle of 11 inch tape around the inside from top to bottom. I have all the shelves to it that are grated and the fin on top still works. I will also pack the bottom with water bottles. I am wondering about if the door is opened and the loss of heat. Anyone else ever make one of these into an incubator or is it to big?

[snakesRkewl]

We have several true cooler incubators, they are probably the best inc you can make for the money.
You will not need that much heat tape, ours have two 30 inch strips of flexwatt in them, a bathroom ceiling fan on the floor plugged into a rheostat and a herpstat thermostat.

The fans that come in these coolers run WAY too hot to use them and they do not circulate the airflow enough to maintain the correct temps top to bottom.
We tried the fan that comes built in to the cooler and had over 90 degrees in the incubator without using any heat tape

[Clint Bundy]

Thanks for that info. Two strips of 11 inch tape? I will cut the power to the fan up top and install a bathroom fan on the bottom also. It does make more sense to circulate from bottom to top. Where did you put your heat sensor at? The top. middle or bottom? Thanks again.

[Rat160]

This is what I built my incubator out of.



I will probably be selling it though cause I need something smaller. Mis-judged the size and it wont fit into my bedroom without taking moldings off the door.

I just used two strips of 11" flexwatt and it holds temps perfect.

[snakesRkewl]

Thanks for that info. Two strips of 11 inch tape? I will cut the power to the fan up top and install a bathroom fan on the bottom also. It does make more sense to circulate from bottom to top. Where did you put your heat sensor at? The top. middle or bottom? Thanks again.

This is what we are doing this year...

We started with two 30 inch strips of 11X12 flexwatt side by side wired together and plugged into a Herpstat.

To control the fan speed we used a zoo-med rheostat, we took apart the case and took off the female plug-in part so we could run the wire out of the inc since we wanted the rheostat dial on the outside of the inc.
The fan we picked up at home depot has a male plug-in making it as easy as that, plug it in and it's going.



Then we put wood running up each side of the back and screwed a piece of plastic(shower stall plastic) cut to size so it fits from the floor up to almost the top of the inc.
Then we took the fan and traced around the outflow tube and cut a hole so the fan would blow air from the inc into the area behind the false wall and up and over the heat tape, then escaping out the top of the inc to be recirculated back to the bottom and into the fan again.




We went to all of that trouble because we noted that all of the tubs on the ends closest to the heat tape were a degree or more warmer than the center of the tubs.
Will it work with just heat tape on the sides and the fan blowing towards the back of the inc?
It certainly will, we had it that way that last couple of years and had a 100% hatch rate, we just didn't care for the small temp difference so we solved that issue with the false back(something I saw first on this forums by someone else)

For water we use the one gallon bottles and put as many as we could fit into the inc up top and on the bottom, effectively giving us 3 shelves to put eighteen 7 qt tubs on.
We had 16 bottles of water, 8 on the bottom around the fan and 8 up top.

Hope that helps...

[Mike41793]

Nice pickup, that cooler should make a nice incubator.
Snakesrkewl- Your incubator looks really good too!

[4Ballz]

$50 is an awesome score :-D

I've seen people use computer fans, one on top, and one on the bottom. Attach a rpm controller to the fans to control the speed. Make a build thread of what you did/do, and this will help others along the way. Good score.

[mechnut450]

i have a similar coke machine ( paid 100 for mine ) but i can actually turn it back onto use as a cold drink storage lol. but i ran a single piece of 3( or 4 ) inch tape from top one sidie to the top of othe side ( in a large U shape.) it works great at keeping the 88-90 temps I wish for . I am on my 3rd year using it with no problems I hang my probe betwee nthe middle of the shelves so it give me a rought avg temp. but i also only use a esu on off tstat. with a great success, ( I hatch more females than I do males lol

[SlitherinSisters]

Very nice! I wish I could find something like that!