Reptile Pro MR-148 incubator

[chameleonneeds]

Hey

Was wondering if anyone has experience with this incubator, and how is it?
I bought a coca cola mini fridge which I intend to use as an incubator, it is the exact same machine as the Reptile Pro MR-148 incubator, except it has the coca cola label on it.

And a friend told me today that it isnt good to run them for too long, such as the whole length of the incubation time period and he said it will probably be ok for diapause though...

Was wondering if hes right about this? I dont want to have to replace it so soon! I intend to use it for long time periods doing diapause and everything...

What you guys think?

I can post pics of it tomorrow if you want to see how identical it is to the Reptile incubator?

Cheers
Tyrone

Oh and I think LLLReptiles sells this incubator.

 

[chameleonoobie]

Thermoelectrics are highly dependant on the ambient temps of the room they are in. If you have great fluctuations, it won’t really work right. I have a mini fridge I converted to a brumator for cooling snakes. It holds the set temp perfectly until the room (in my case my business warehouse) got really cold during a cool snap. The temps went dangerously close to freezing on me. I think you would be better off running it through one of the Johnson controllers that they sell for beer making. You drill a small hole and insert the temperature probe and plug the mini fridge into the Johnson. Then it will cycle the fridge to perfection. Just to elaborate, if going to the expense of the Johnson controller, you could pick up a sweet used refrigerator off Craig’s list or some place that would be probably as cheap as the incubator or thermoelectric fridge and have massive incubator space.

 

[chameleonneeds]

Yeah I know what you mean...I thought I would just have to operate it manualy changing it from the cooling system to the heating system...I will be incubating at fairly low temperatures anyway...around 19-20 degrees celsius for the diapause then around 22 or 23 at the max out of diapause...and its winter now here in South Africa so I will probably keep it on the heating system to get it to reach the temperatures...

If it becomes too much I will try track down the Johnsons thing you are talking about and set that up...