‘ve been wanting to build a larger incubator for some time.  When Lilian and I built our incubator last year, we put a post out on freecycle.com asking for a free ice chest or small fridge.  We got the Omaha Steaks ice chest and a larger dorm fridge for free.  We ended up using the smaller ice chest for our first incubator.  The fridge has been sitting in our shop for the last year just collecting dust (something I’m learning on the farm is to not throw away everything, a lot of stuff will come in handy again).

About a month ago we were at the feed store buying quail food.  There was a woman there that approached Julia.  She runs a poultry coop of farmers from around the valley that raise all kinds of poultry.  Chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, etc.  She had been looking to get in to quail, and asked us if we would like to join their coop and become their supplier for quail.  We said we would.  We will now be selling quail eggs and incubating quail and selling them through Oregon Cooperative Hatchery (I think that’s the name).

So, since we were going to be needing to incubate more than just one group of eggs at a time, we needed a larger incubator.  I would like to buy one (here’s the one I want to buy if anybody is looking for a father’s day gift!!!  Dickey’s Incubators, the 2X2 one would be nice!!) I decided to finally build one out of the fridge I’ve had in the shop.  I’ve had the wafer thermometer and heating element for some time now, so all I needed to do was put everything together.

It took a couple of nights but it is now working and I’m trying to get it stabilized at 99.5.  I had an old computer that didn’t work so I took one of the fans out and I am using the fan from there.

Here’s the fridge.

It’s not pretty but it’s solid.  I took out all the workings but left the electrical hooked up.

I have the fan and heating element up where the freezer was

Since the fan doesn’t run on regular electricity, you can see the small black cord running from the top of the fan outside.  On the outside of the refridgerator I put an electrical box.  In this box I put a live plug, and a switch.  The switch will turn on the heating element.

You can see the fan plugged in here.

The switch give power to the thermostat and that runs the heating element.  Here’s a shot of the inside of the fridge:

As you can see I still haven’t cleaned up the wires (wanted to make sure it worked and all) but it is working (too well, it was up to 106°).

Now I couldn’t just put the eggs on the shelf, I needed something to put the eggs in, so I built a box last night that holds about 130 eggs.

This box will sit on the shelf, and I’ll tip the box left and right so the eggs will be moved easily.  Looking forward to trying it out this weekend!