Homemade Foam Cooler Egg Incubator

Incubators can be costly, even for a small, manual incubator that doesn’t have any of the fancy bells and whistles like temperature and humidity control. Your can make a homemade foam cooler egg incubator for a fraction of the cost.

What you need:

– foam cooler with lid – we bought ours at a grocery store – scrap wood for the platform frame – chicken wire – 3 prong plug cord – thermostat – ceiling base – plexiglass – small fan

Measure the base to build a raised platform from scraps of wood. You then attach the chicken wire to the platform. We also needed up cutting a cooling rack to size to give it a more solid platform to sit the eggs on.

Add a half-inch hole to the side of the cooler where you will attach the thermostat to the side of the cooler with cable ties. Run the temperature wire through the hole to the inside of the cooler. Place in the platform.

Cut a viewing window in the lid. The bigger the window the more viewing space you will have, but also have more surface area without insulation and lose more heat. Tape the plexiglass into place.

We also added a small fan to help the air/heat circulate within the incubator. Our first hatch the eggs in the middle developed and hatch but the ends did not. Adding a fan gives us a great incubation success rate.

Make sure to run your new incubator for a day before you add your eggs so you know that it is running correctly. We have had many successful hatches in this incubator.