Our chicken incubator
Hatching chickens can teach you an awful lot about global warming science. I made the mistake last time of just “checking” the temperature using an industrial probe … it wasn’t quite right, so I tried a glass thermometer, that was out, but how did I know whether it was the incubator or the thermometers. So, I hit on the idea of buying a few clinical thermometers and putting them in various places around the incubator. Again, none of them showed the expected temperature, and all of them were slightly different. I must have fiddled with those thermometers on and off for the full three weeks.
This time it is all different. I’ve contented myself just looking through the top onto the supplied thermometer. Possibly because the less chickens that hatch, the less chickens that will be outside digging up the flower beds, but perhaps because I know it isn’t perfect and even if it’s out by half a degree, it’s not the end of the world.
So, even though I’ve still got masses of equipment for temperature measurement when I used to design precision ovens, I still can’t be sure of the temperature in a little tiny box to better than around 0.5C. So, how can you measure temperatures globally much better?
Except … I did notice I’d dropped the temperature at the end of the last hatch … and so these chickens have just experienced a massive rise in temperature of around 0.25C. And if I look very carefully, I think I can even now see a small tornado developing …
You’re on to it. Wasn’t it a chicken that said the sky was falling?
I like this article. Really interesting. I also like your incubator. Incubating can be a really fun process especially if you have little ones at home. Depending on the type of incubator that you have you can hatch just about any type of eggs. A chicken incubator works really well. I have noticed that purchasing an incubator online is a great option as you can get what you want at a great price.