Bzzz!
This post was supposed to be about how we incubate chicks and I was going to give it to my wife, but I had to make some adjustments to my plans and here's what happened.
Prices are rising, and the military situation is not conducive to a profitable career, so I decided to focus on autonomy!
We decided to start raising chickens by next winter so that they can lay eggs for us. (We already got a calf for milk!) 🐄
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To do this, we bought a used incubator at a low price. It turned out to be a pretty old device, a 1991 model, called an broody - incubator for 50 eggs. 🐥
Almost the entire village collected fertilized eggs from under the chickens and in a few days for us collected 50 eggs!
🌡 There are certain rules for incubation if you want to achieve success, and one of them is temperature. The ideal temperature for hatching chicks is 37.9C from day 1 to day 6 of incubation, then gradually decrease to 36.8C by day 15 and to 36.2C by day 21...
It's a good thing I thought to check the incubator's functionality before loading the eggs...
This is the control block. 💻 It contains electronics responsible for maintaining the desired temperature and the mechanism for turning the eggs.
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As seen in the photo, the temperature controller does not have any scale or marks, so I decided to adjust it as it is - simply by finding the right temperature adjustment. All that's left is to guess which direction to turn it in))) 🎰 🎲
To do this, I plugged the incubator into the socket, put an experimental giraffe and a mercury thermometer with a fairly accurate scale inside. I will measure the temperature of the giraffe remotely through the top hatch with an infrared thermometer.
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But here's the problem - no matter which way I turn the regulator, the temperature does not rise above 32 degrees, and that's very cold. 😕
To understand the sensitivity of the adjustment and make sure I choose the right direction to turn the regulator, I connected a multimeter to the contacts of the heating element to see exactly when power is applied and the heating elements turn on. 🤹♀
As a result, I realized that the device does not respond to turning the regulator and turns on the heating elements arbitrarily. ☠️
We decided to dismantle the control block and go inside.
Some of the bolts turned out to be rusted, and I was only able to slightly bend the metal flaps of the casing.
That was enough to extract the variable resistor responsible for temperature adjustment and pull it out with some of the wiring.
Here it is better to see that there is no control contact at all! 🙅♂
Now comes the hard part - finding a replacement.
The nearest radio shop is very far away, and ordering by mail would take too long, so we'll have to make do with what we have.
We rummage through our supply of old junk and find a variable resistor that looks as similar in value and size to assemble the necessary resistance circuit.
The original resistor was a nominal 2.2KOm, but according to multimeter measurements it was 1.9KOm.
I found a variable resistor with only 1k ohms. Therefore, I must add 512Om and 220Om (what was available) to the edges to get ~1.7KOm, but with a slightly limited adjustment range.
Since the new resistor is slightly different in type and size, it did not fit into the original mounting location, and for the testing period, I decided to leave it outside. This is how it will look now
Tests showed that the incubator is working fine: It reaches the desired temperature and maintains it afterwards. 🕺
After a day of testing, I put everything together and load our eggs.
It turned out that there were not enough rods in the egg tray that would move the egg and turn them.
In a hurry, I wound two wooden rulers with tape and inserted them into the frame. Another rod was made from wire of the appropriate diameter.
Now the eggs are slowly warming up to the required temperature, and if everything goes as planned, expect a report on our incubation in about 28 days. 🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣🐣
