|
Stockwell, I am very impressed with your professional looking incubators. I particularly like the inlaid panel for the thermostat (my thermostat sits on top of my incubator, sealed in a plastic box so that the dial can't be tampered with).
My main incubator issue is insulation, which is why I went for usijng an old refrigerator. My home has neither air conditioning or central heating, for the climate here is usually not extreme enough to require either (although if I worked at home during the day I'd opt for air conditioning). The temperature in my home therefore goes up and down with the outside temperatures, so a wooden incubator just wouldn't keep the eggs from experiencing fluctuations. As it is, I have to move the incubator into my garage during summer to avoid it overheating on those rare extremely hot days (a couple of days of 40-42C this year killed off friends' seasonal egg production, in one instance 120+ diamond python eggs), then back up to my apartment in autumn. In winter the temperature in my apartment may drop to 12C at night, but it's lower in the garage.
I chose bulbs for ease/speed of installation (got the incubator built just in time this past season, with a week or so spare to test it) and so I could tell instantly whether or not are doing their job. Space will certainly be an issue in that little bar fridge, though, so I may have to think about switching over to heat tape, too. I reckon that there may be a very narrow window of opportunity to get that done, between the last eggs from last season's last clutch hatching and the first clutch of the next season being laid, unless I set it all up in a separate incubator while this one is still full. I've picked a species with one of the longest incubation times of any reptile, so if they multiclutch late enough in the season the incubator will be full of the same female's eggs 24/7/365.
Last edited by crocdoc; 05-04-04 at 03:12 AM..
|
Hybrid Mode
