# can i make my own incubator without burning my house down?



## tyronerasheed (Oct 21, 2021)

Hello everyone, i started to get fertile eggs and for temporary id like to see if i can make a incubator without burning my house down and to have chicks by day 22


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## robin416 (Sep 8, 2013)

Yes, you can. @Poultry Judge has built his own and can probably help you with ideas on the steps to take.


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## Poultry Judge (Jul 15, 2020)

robin416 said:


> Yes, you can. @Poultry Judge has built his own and can probably help you with ideas on the steps to take.


Please start with a commercial incubator to get your feet wet, even if it is an inexpensive one from the farm store. I'm not trying to discourage you at all, but building them becomes its own rabbit hole and is really only worth the labor and heartache if you are trying to hatch eggs in which you have a significant investment. I still use a commercial incubator for chickens, ducks, guineas, turkey and quail. I only use my hand built one for peafowl and emu eggs. That incubator is a bit of a Frankenstein build, with two separate heat zones and multiple solid state controllers. There are lots of folks here on the forum who can give you good hatching advice. If you are a scientist or engineer and choose to build a lab quality incubator it will cost several thousand dollars, no kidding. However, when I sold my emu flock, I sold my incubator with them for five thousand dollars to a specialist breeder. I built it as a labor of love, and I'm now too old to chase emus, so it was okay for it to go serve another much bigger flock. My only real advice is to do what brings you joy in life. The antics of my birds bring me joy on a daily basis and offset all of the other worry with keeping the sanctuary afloat. Hatching babies is part of that magic.


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## Sardonyx#1 (9 mo ago)

I bough a Farm Innovator incubator for $10.00 at a yard sale. I had several successful hatches with it but it does require a lot of attention. 
I recently built an incubator using scrap plywood and parts from 2 old styrofoam incubators. Tomorrow is hatch day for the first clutch in it. The eggs were moved from another incubator that stopped working 2 weeks into incubation (a long story). At the time I moved them they were candled and showed good development but could have died when the incubator broke.
The FI incubator was in use at the time (lockdown) so I could not transfer the eggs to it. The homemade incubator is holding temp and humidity fairly consistent. However, it is sensitive to external conditions. Hopefully it will work.
By the way the FI incubator that was on lockdown did hatch 12 of 13 eggs.


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