Newbreeder
New member
Hello all.
I am just getting into breeding leopard geckos and part way through incubating my first ever clutch with a homemade incubator. As i gain more experience and mate more than 1 female at a time i will look at getting a proper incubator, but for now, the one i have made is doing a great job.
I know not everyone sets out to breed but eggs do happen when unexpected and i think this is where this may come in useful for those who just want to do it as cheap as possible.
Here i will go into as much detail as possible about how i made my incubators, including where i got the materials and how much they cost. I paid about £30 on making 2 incubators but worth mentioning that i already had the heat mats which do cost about the same as it cost me to make the whole thing. So having a spare one would be a winner.
I hope it can be of use to you and you get some great babies from it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Equipment
Materials
First of all you want to get a decent sized polystyrene box. I got a couple for free from my local Aquatics shop. They tend to have a lot lying around as they get fish delivered in them. Mine were 19x15x14 inches (length x depth x height).
Next fill the bottom of the polystyrene box with sponges.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:16:16
The reason for this is to create humidity within the box. I occasionally spray the sponges a few times with water and in time the heat will cause it to evaporate and create the humidity.
The next step is to create a source of heat and method to control the heat. Some might say you need a good thermostat to control the temperature but after a fair bit of experimenting i found that a cheap one from ebay did the best job. I tried a Habistat and Ministat100 and both had the same problem. I found that when i had them set to 85°F, the temperature would fluctuate from 82 to 87. Now this is ok for hatching eggs in general but not if you want a specific sex.
So in the end what i found to work best was this thermostat i got from ebay for around £5. The temperature only fluctuated by 0.1 - 0.3°c which is a lot more accurate.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-17 09:36:19
Now you have to wire it into the heat cable yourself but it is really not hard.
What you first need to do is cut the heat cable wire, making sure that you have enough cable to play with for inside of the box and a little more to attach to the thermostat on the outside of the box.
Now you want to strip all the ends of the wires and twist them together. The picture above shows which wires to attach where. Obviously the plug being the battery and heat mat being the light. To give a good solid connection you want to solder the wires and wrap them in insulation tape. The last thing you want is to get 30 days into incubation and a loose connection killing your eggs.
Once you do that you will have something looking like this.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:40:58
Now you will need to create a hole for the wire to pass through. What i did is used a file to take a chunk out of the top and inside for the wires sit in in a way that they wont stop the lid from closing without leaving a gap.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:45:49
You will have 3 wires you need to pass through this gap. The heat mat cable, the probe attached to the thermostat and a thermometer probe. I used this thermometer which cost me about £2 but you can get them from anywhere for a good price.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:48:23
Just like the heat mat cable you need to give yourself enough wire to play with on the inside so that you can get the probes inside the tub.
Lay them on the gap you created and hot glue them in place like this? Then fill the gap you made and cover the glue with tape to make sure it keeps its shape while cooling.
http://grabilla.com/09310-3a7ddfc8-2c0e-49e0-86f4-966417f46e27.html
http://grabilla.com/09310-ecc789f9-8cc4-43ab-965d-d2ede811381e.html
With the hot glue gun still at hand, stick the thermostat onto the outside of the box and stick the thermometer to or next to the thermostat. You might aswell tidy and loose wires up while you are at it too.
http://grabilla.com/09311-80956f83-4ed3-461d-8e73-3b9ea472ae65.html
Now all that is left to do is set the temperature on the thermostat and set up a place for the eggs to incubate.
As you may already have noticed the thermostat and thermometer read in degrees celsius. This is no big deal, you just need convert it. So if you are incubating for females you would set is at 27.5°c, if you want a mix you would set it at 29°c and if you want males you would set it at 30.6°c.
With any digital thermostat you have to set a minimum and maximum temperature.You do this by holding the up and down buttons until the digits starts flashing and then set it to what you want. I just set them both at the desired temperature to avoid any unwanted fluctuation.
The final step now is to get your plastic container sorted for the eggs. You will need perlite as a substrate. You could use vermiculite but i find perlite to be better. You need to mix the substrate with water. This article can help you create the correct ratio, along with other things, so be sure to give it a good read.
*http://www.albeysreptiles.com/incubate-eggs.htm#
Once you have the substrate mixed, you can put the eggs in and tightly seal the lid. I personally put a small tea light candle holder of water in container to help keep the humidity up. It is not essential but just a safe guard incase the perlite dries out.
*http://grabilla.com/09311-2cb44899-10b1-4e92-b02c-8c67a5bfe69e.html
Finally you want to place a hydrometer in with the eggs too. This will measure the humidity in the container. Personally dont think this is very important. I dont have my hydrometer in the container, i have mine inside the polystyrene box. As long as the egg container has a good amount of condensation all the way around on the inside of it, i would say you are good. If there is no condensation you either need more moisture or need to seal the container better.
A few of things to mention before you are finished. First of all. Make sure you place the heat mat on top of the egg container and not underneath. Heat rises and dont want to end up with hard boiled eggs.
http://grabilla.com/09311-8ad59a74-a92b-43e1-9d9a-602d9e596352.html
Second, once you have the incubator up and running, you may notice the reading on the thermostat and thermometer differ a tiny bit. This is no big issue. On one of my incubators the thermometer read around 0.5° higher than the thermostat and on the other it read around 0.5° lower. All you need to do is set thermostat a tiny bit higher/lower until you get the reading you need on the thermometer.
http://grabilla.com/09311-5b862112-eb2a-4404-a5a6-7ddb272e8a0b.html
Finally, when changing min/max temperature on the thermostat it will sometimes switch itself off (you will hear a click and the red light goes off). To avoid this you need to set the max before the min (or the other way around).
And there you go! That is my take on making a cheap and effective incubator for your eggs. If there are any questions or anything you think i may have left out, just let me know.
I wish you all success in hatching baby geckos!
Andrew
I am just getting into breeding leopard geckos and part way through incubating my first ever clutch with a homemade incubator. As i gain more experience and mate more than 1 female at a time i will look at getting a proper incubator, but for now, the one i have made is doing a great job.
I know not everyone sets out to breed but eggs do happen when unexpected and i think this is where this may come in useful for those who just want to do it as cheap as possible.
Here i will go into as much detail as possible about how i made my incubators, including where i got the materials and how much they cost. I paid about £30 on making 2 incubators but worth mentioning that i already had the heat mats which do cost about the same as it cost me to make the whole thing. So having a spare one would be a winner.
I hope it can be of use to you and you get some great babies from it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Equipment
- Hot glue gun
- Insulation tape
- Stanley knife
- File
- Soldering iron
Materials
- Polystyrene box
- Sponges
- Thermostat
- Thermometer
- Hydrometer
- Heat mat
- Perlite
- Plastic container
- Tealight candle holder
First of all you want to get a decent sized polystyrene box. I got a couple for free from my local Aquatics shop. They tend to have a lot lying around as they get fish delivered in them. Mine were 19x15x14 inches (length x depth x height).
Next fill the bottom of the polystyrene box with sponges.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:16:16
The reason for this is to create humidity within the box. I occasionally spray the sponges a few times with water and in time the heat will cause it to evaporate and create the humidity.
The next step is to create a source of heat and method to control the heat. Some might say you need a good thermostat to control the temperature but after a fair bit of experimenting i found that a cheap one from ebay did the best job. I tried a Habistat and Ministat100 and both had the same problem. I found that when i had them set to 85°F, the temperature would fluctuate from 82 to 87. Now this is ok for hatching eggs in general but not if you want a specific sex.
So in the end what i found to work best was this thermostat i got from ebay for around £5. The temperature only fluctuated by 0.1 - 0.3°c which is a lot more accurate.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-17 09:36:19
Now you have to wire it into the heat cable yourself but it is really not hard.
What you first need to do is cut the heat cable wire, making sure that you have enough cable to play with for inside of the box and a little more to attach to the thermostat on the outside of the box.
Now you want to strip all the ends of the wires and twist them together. The picture above shows which wires to attach where. Obviously the plug being the battery and heat mat being the light. To give a good solid connection you want to solder the wires and wrap them in insulation tape. The last thing you want is to get 30 days into incubation and a loose connection killing your eggs.
Once you do that you will have something looking like this.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:40:58
Now you will need to create a hole for the wire to pass through. What i did is used a file to take a chunk out of the top and inside for the wires sit in in a way that they wont stop the lid from closing without leaving a gap.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:45:49
You will have 3 wires you need to pass through this gap. The heat mat cable, the probe attached to the thermostat and a thermometer probe. I used this thermometer which cost me about £2 but you can get them from anywhere for a good price.
Grabilla screen capture: 2019-03-16 22:48:23
Just like the heat mat cable you need to give yourself enough wire to play with on the inside so that you can get the probes inside the tub.
Lay them on the gap you created and hot glue them in place like this? Then fill the gap you made and cover the glue with tape to make sure it keeps its shape while cooling.
http://grabilla.com/09310-3a7ddfc8-2c0e-49e0-86f4-966417f46e27.html
http://grabilla.com/09310-ecc789f9-8cc4-43ab-965d-d2ede811381e.html
With the hot glue gun still at hand, stick the thermostat onto the outside of the box and stick the thermometer to or next to the thermostat. You might aswell tidy and loose wires up while you are at it too.
http://grabilla.com/09311-80956f83-4ed3-461d-8e73-3b9ea472ae65.html
Now all that is left to do is set the temperature on the thermostat and set up a place for the eggs to incubate.
As you may already have noticed the thermostat and thermometer read in degrees celsius. This is no big deal, you just need convert it. So if you are incubating for females you would set is at 27.5°c, if you want a mix you would set it at 29°c and if you want males you would set it at 30.6°c.
With any digital thermostat you have to set a minimum and maximum temperature.You do this by holding the up and down buttons until the digits starts flashing and then set it to what you want. I just set them both at the desired temperature to avoid any unwanted fluctuation.
The final step now is to get your plastic container sorted for the eggs. You will need perlite as a substrate. You could use vermiculite but i find perlite to be better. You need to mix the substrate with water. This article can help you create the correct ratio, along with other things, so be sure to give it a good read.
*http://www.albeysreptiles.com/incubate-eggs.htm#
Once you have the substrate mixed, you can put the eggs in and tightly seal the lid. I personally put a small tea light candle holder of water in container to help keep the humidity up. It is not essential but just a safe guard incase the perlite dries out.
*http://grabilla.com/09311-2cb44899-10b1-4e92-b02c-8c67a5bfe69e.html
Finally you want to place a hydrometer in with the eggs too. This will measure the humidity in the container. Personally dont think this is very important. I dont have my hydrometer in the container, i have mine inside the polystyrene box. As long as the egg container has a good amount of condensation all the way around on the inside of it, i would say you are good. If there is no condensation you either need more moisture or need to seal the container better.
A few of things to mention before you are finished. First of all. Make sure you place the heat mat on top of the egg container and not underneath. Heat rises and dont want to end up with hard boiled eggs.
http://grabilla.com/09311-8ad59a74-a92b-43e1-9d9a-602d9e596352.html
Second, once you have the incubator up and running, you may notice the reading on the thermostat and thermometer differ a tiny bit. This is no big issue. On one of my incubators the thermometer read around 0.5° higher than the thermostat and on the other it read around 0.5° lower. All you need to do is set thermostat a tiny bit higher/lower until you get the reading you need on the thermometer.
http://grabilla.com/09311-5b862112-eb2a-4404-a5a6-7ddb272e8a0b.html
Finally, when changing min/max temperature on the thermostat it will sometimes switch itself off (you will hear a click and the red light goes off). To avoid this you need to set the max before the min (or the other way around).
And there you go! That is my take on making a cheap and effective incubator for your eggs. If there are any questions or anything you think i may have left out, just let me know.
I wish you all success in hatching baby geckos!
Andrew
Last edited:
