Brinsea Products now offers bird and reptile breeders a comprehensive range of equipment to suit all applications. Go to the product comparison chart to select the equipment for your species of birds or reptiles.

Incubators are usually the most expensive single purchase for any breeder and care should be taken to choose the right unit for your needs.

It is not hard to build a box, fit a heater, some type of temperature control and water tray and sell it as an incubator. Simple, right? Well - no. To give every egg the best possible chance of hatching the temperature must be controlled throughout the space where the eggs are held, no matter that the incubator is in a cold barn in the dead of winter. This means two things: One - the air flow must be designed to give as even temperature distribution as possible and, two, the cabinet must retain as much heat as possible.

No matter how good your airflow characteristics, no incubator will maintain even temperature if the cabinet is poorly insulated. Poor insulation also wastes energy as well as increasing the likelihood of 'coldspots'. So avoid designs with large areas of thin cabinet material. It doesn't matter how accurate your temperature control system is if the temperature of the air within your incubator is not consistent. All Brinsea incubators are designed to control temperature accurately throughout the space that your eggs occupy.

The cabinets of our still-air Hatchmaker, Polyhatch and Hatchmaster incubators are moulded from expanded polyurethane which is tough and has excellent thermal insulation properties. The Octagon range incorporate a major innovation: Omnitherm™ heating systems. Large areas of the cabinet wall are gently warmed by specially made thin film heaters ensuring unparalleled temperature evenness and control.

Egg turning can be done manually but it is becoming clear that for some species (including parrots) turning needs to be at least every hour so. So unless turning eggs throughout the day (and night) is your idea of fun, automatic turning is a must. The problems associated with most egg turning systems can be that they are limited to certain sizes of egg which means buying extra fittings to suit different species. Some turning systems can actually cause damage to eggs, so check that the incubator you buy could not do this. The third problem is that turning mechanisms can be hard to keep clean which is vital if disease is to be avoided. We have two unique patented turning systems. Our still-air Polyhatch and Hatchmaster A incorporate our innovative moving tray turning system which is both flexible and practically unknown to damage eggs. Our Octagon range go one stage further with the turning systems on the outside of the incubators which rotate the whole cabinet leaving the insides free of hazardous and hard to clean mechanisms.

The first consideration in choosing an incubator is, of course, egg capacity. Bear in mind here that several smaller machines may offer advantages in flexibility, although the cost per egg will probably be more. Second you need to decide if you need a fan in your incubator. Generally, poultry, game and waterfowl eggs hatch well in both kinds of machine, and many people have good results even with exotic species in the Polyhatch. However, most the experts prefer incubators with fans for exotic birds because of the greater level of control. (Be sure that the fan is vibration free and has ball bearings or you will have problems later; we've made that mistake in the past.) This is why both the Octagon 20 series and 100 series have become the favourites of professionals.

All the same principles for designing quality incubators apply to the design of temperature controlled brooders for exotic birds including parrots and birds of prey. Brinsea's TLC - 4 incorporates quality incubator control with the special needs of young or sick birds in its ground-breaking design.