Home Made Incubator There are many commercial incubators on the market and all are rather pricey. Unless you need to incubate alot of eggs these are usually quite irrelevant and impractical to the small time hobbyist. So I am going to show you how to make your own small incubator that does the job just as well for a portion of the cost. Dependant on the size of styrofoam box you aquire you could incubate 10 - 100 eggs quite comfortably. To make your home made incubator there are a few things you will first need.
First we want to free the cable from the plug on heat mat, so take your philips screwdriver and unscrew the first main screw holding the plugs casing on, there might be a sticker in place of this screw so just screw through the sticker until you can get at the screw.. Once that has been removed we then want to unscrew the cables inside using the small flat head screwdriver. You need to remember the placement of these cables for when we put it back together.
Now place the heat mat inside the styrofoam box and roughly work out where you want the cable to exit the box. Once you are happy use the philips screwdriver to make a small hole through the side of the box and then thread the heat mat cable through, now rescrew the plug back together.
Now the heat mat is in place we need to seal around the hole with our silicone on the inside of our styrofoam box to make it airtight once again. Allow 24 hours for the sealant to cure before adding any substrate to the inside of our styrofoam box.
I used sand inside the box which you can then sit your egg laying container into but you could use anything or nothing, experiment to find what works best for you. Use the philips screwdriver and make a hole large enough to accomodate the thermostats probe and the digital thermometer probe. Thread both probes through into the styrofoam box.
We are almost done and ready for eggs, but you should always use a good quality digital thermometer to check the temperature inside your egg container before incubating to ensure the temperatures are perfect. Once all checked and you are happy you can now use your home made incubator to hatch those cute little geckos.
After testing this incubator I found it better than my store bought hovabator and will be using this to incubate my eggs this year. It maintains the temperature very well until you remove the lid which it then drops a few degrees but the sand inside acts as an insulator itself which in turn keeps the incubating container pretty much the same temp. When setup with a decent thermostat like a pulse proportional it is basically flawless and should hatch you alot of gecko eggs. If you have any questions about this DIY guide or require some further info please use the form on the contact us page.
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