Development of hot spring fed incubator for duck eggs

The development of hot spring heat source incubator for duck eggs was deemed necessary to design the utilization of hot spring as heat source for incubating duck eggs, to reduce the use of electricity. This study addressed issues such as replacing conventional source of energy with geothermal energy in Los Baňos, Laguna, Philippines for incubation of eggs (ducklings, ballot and penoy). The experimental design used was two factors at three levels (2 × 3): ventilation opening (30, 45 and 60°) and number of evaporating pans (3, 4 and 5 pans) and each run had duration of 23 h. Sampling of the average temperature and relative humidity showed an average of 100 samples per hour. The data were analyzed using surface response regression to select the run within optimal conditions. The surface response and multiple regression revealed that the optimal setup was with the ventilation opened at 30° and 5 evaporating pans in the incubator. The optimal conditions were the mean temperature and relative humidity of 37.5°C at the top tray and 49.6% at the bottom tray as predicted by the mathematical model using trial version of Design of Experiment (DoE) 10.0.  Key words: Hot spring, incubator, heat source, geothermal, energy, duck eggs.