The Poultry Health & Hatching Forum

Demand for Wifi Access on Incubators

Whats peoples opinion on Wifi Access to incubation control?
Is it something you would use ?

Brinsea are launching later in 2023 this as an option on their Maxi Ex & Ovation 28 & 56 EX range of incubators.

Price is as yet unconfirmed but expected to add approx 20% to the price.

It will not be able to be fitted to existing brinsea machines.

River Systems are also launching a wifi version on their 12, 24 & 49 egg incubators.

Flock Master
Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

Just something else to go wrong for little perceivable benefit.

Glyn
Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

I bought some high low temp/ humidity monitors from Amazon.

I threw three in to ensure the airflow was even.

Before that I used data loggers, but they were temperature only.

The incubator was not commercial though, it was a homebrew device.

The high/ low monitors were more than adequate, but a logger is needed for the nice pretty pictures of "trend" lines.

It's hard to see what concentrated remote monitoring would do really, would the wifi have a UPS? My thoughts are that the most likely problem is going to be a power fail or a breaker trip.

The only commercial incubator I used was a trifle compact and would have been difficult to do both temperature and humidity in cheaply. From the design and operation I would think it might not be good for the nervous system knowing too much about the eggy environment within.It was Chinese Engineering at its most typical, monitoring consisted of listening to the noise of the fan, when the noise stopped the fan bearings had packed in.

A repair wasn't possible in reasonable time, so the "monitoring" wasn't beneficial apart from saving a few Watts of power by aborting the run.

kwackers
Thursday, January 12th, 2023