Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Anybody know if a refrigerator can maintain about 55 degrees and serve as a brumator, and then be dialed in to 73 degrees as an incubator and serve dual purpose?
I’d like to put one together for creating ideal temps here in swealtering no winter sterile male Florida, and then maybe using it also for ideal egg incubation. Where I am I would need to refrigerate eggs to cool them DOWN to the ideal temps, not heat them up. Anybody know if a refrigerator can maintain those ideal temps and serve dual purpose? I am maintaining my collection in a warehouse bay for the first time and it is always in the low eighties up to high eighties in there all the time- I need cooling help, as there is no ac in there.

Most (affordable) refridgerators do not maintain temperature by thermostat, but rather by altering the orifice of the expansion valve. So you can't dial in 55 deg, you dial up and then wait and measure. Like a dimmer on a heater (in reverse). Plus, they are designed for temps around 40-50 deg, not for wide-range.

You could drill a hole to lessen the insulation effects, but now you are using lots of power.

Wine coolers may be your best bet. Many of those do have electronic settings, and they are suited for upper 50s and all the 60s deg F range. I don't know how high up you can go. Ours can do 70-sh deg, but I don't know how much higher.

In the above post I was referring to non-modified refridgerators.

Like Chris mentioned, if you get a thermostat (an ON/OFF model) rated for the current of the fridge compressor motor (I think around a 13-15 amp rating is necessary), you could use that to control the ON/OFF of the compressor motor based on the inside temp of the fridge.

I once got the grand tour of a zoo with a very respected curator and collection. It was winter time and much of the zoo's rare stuff was in brumation. Essentially I took a tour of various old refidgerators, most of them commercial models, that had been converted into brumation chambers with lidless racks build into them. All of them were being run off of cheap thermostats from Grainger. That zoo back then bred the heck out of a lot of rare species so it must have worked.

I have heard of somebody using either a Ranco or Johnson's Controls Tstat with a fridge. In that case you have to make sure you get the model with a cooling function. I think there is a manual switch you have to shift yourself. I had a dealer show me at a reptile show once.

There is another company that sells a variety of thermostats that automatically switch between heating and cooling. I'll see if I can remember that URL. They had some neat thermostats.
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Current snakes:

0.0.1 Gonyosoma oxycephala - Java locale (green)

1.2 Gonyosoma oxycephala - Jave local (green)

2.2 Gonyosoma janseni - Seleyar locale (all black)

1.2 Gonyosoma janseni - Celebes locale (Black & Tan)