Mar. 24, 2009 - The Incubator
I thought I should elaborate now on the project that would have electrocuted me had we lived in the good old days. All it really did was to give us a minor light show for a millisecond and melt a little copper... hee hee.
Carlos and I are building an incubator for school. Yesterday we hooked up the light and after the aforementioned lapse in brain power, we managed to get the thermostat working properly. Carlos monitored temperatures for a while with the thermostat in different positions to see what gave us the least swing in air temperature. We're getting close.
Today we will be dismantling the old computer to rob from it a fan. We'll see just how this changes things. We hope it keeps the heat more uniform in the incubator. We will have to shape some hardware cloth to keep chicks out of contact with the wires and direct heat, as well as an egg turner, and a sponge for humidity with an access tube from the outside so we don't have to open the incubator.
We are building this in a cheap styrofoam cooler, and I wish I'd have saved the old coleman hard cooler we had... it would have made for a much nicer finish. Now I'm considering using a non working mini fridge the next time around.
We'll post pics of the finished product when we can, and maybe we can snap some cool egg candling pictures to post too. If all goes well, of course we'll post some cute fluffy pictures at the end of our experiment.
