i am going to have to go back some steps and redesign alot of this! I am now going to need a super power save mode for everything,
We had yet another power cut the other night at about 1am. luckily my mum was up but it took nearly 40 mins to get my generator hooked up and started, and the main generator was off line as it is having new bits fitted to the engine.
It wasnt too bad for the eggs although i am used to the incubators that dad builds and it came as a shock to see just how quick commercial incubators cool down!
Anyway it has me thinking, that i need to be able to have the incubators,hatchers and in some ways more importantly the brooders able to run in a power save mode and auto switch onto Battery power untill i can get the generator started, i also need a alarm that goes off when there is no power. The other reason for power save mode is capacity, the generator is only rated at 2KW and the commercial incubator runs at around 850W then you have the brooders that use 100W bulbs and so far there are 4 of these, so my idea is to go back and take another look at everything, my biggest challenge is going to be the brooder's, normally what you do is stick 150W infra red bulb over the brooder container and you get nice and toasty chicks! but because you have to be really careful with the number and types and ages of the birds in each box you can soon have alot of brooders running!
so i am now thinking along the lines of a central heat box well insulated not very big and kept a bit hotter than the brooders (say around 130f) and maybe a heat mass (not sure on that), then have square ducting (plastic square drain pipe) from the box into each brooder and have a fan behind a grid slowly pushing warm air into each box. if i use an acrylic top with a small hole in kind of like a plastic plant propagator i can regulate things like humidity a little.
I will also have a temp sensor in each, the main problem is i cant have the fan blowing too hard as they hate drafts. Also it has to be able to be run from a deep cycle battery for at least 2 hours along with everything else.
For heating i am looking at those soldering iron heating elements, i had a pack of five arrive the other day and although i havnt tried them yet i am pretty impressed. they are small and have a thermistor already inside them, each is rated 50W and 24V, they cost just over £1 each so i am thinking if i put 4 in the box and i could in theory run around 5-6 brooders on 2, so in a power cut it switches from 2 running at 24V AC to 4 running at 12VDC.
i can leave the humidity controller off for upto around 18 hours if needed in the incubator but will have to have it on in the hatcher, I am also thinking with the hatcher and incubators i am going to add more of the heater elements to each than i had originally anticipated, several reason's for this, First off when you have to do stuff inside the incubator you open the door and you get a large drop in temperature, so would be good under normal conditions to have extra heat i can switch in to bring up the temperature quicker, then i can switch to just one and maybe another one once every couple of mins just to boost the temp a little (i need to play with the heaters this weekend and get a feel for them). The hard part is i am aware you need a certain amount of watts to heat a certain mass/area, but not all watts are equal!! when dad was messing with building incubators for example, we found that 2 12V 50V halogen bulls eye bulb's didnt heat the incubator as well as a single clear glass bulb! and even better than that were the half silvered 100W spot light bulbs they got really hot!
but i am hoping that these little heaters will top them all if i mount them right
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Also i will need to look at how many fans run in power save mode but more on that next time. Also i am going to have to sync the heaters in power save so not too many are on at the same time because i want a 50% safety margin on the genie which gives me a 1KW max to run everything. I have already designed the project to use a micro for each part of the incubators and in the case of fan's they run 3 micro's, also a central 'command micro that is also a interface so i can get info in and out via rs232 when i need to, for example some settings will be in eeprom so i can update those and also get a temp log out via rs232. So i have already gone down the spi/i2c route for the micro's to talk to each other (i have a basic form of this on the bench now using spi), so i am thinking the heaters will have to fire a set number at a time and wait there turn, but retain the ability to jump the cue by a signal line if there temp is past a set level. ANYWAY more o come later when i have had a chance to rethink! but i need to move fast on this now! we had no power for 18 hours this time