by Ian S. Bessell of S&J Reptiles
When you suffer from the illness known as “Chondro Addiction” one of the many symptoms you will exhibit is the constant need to adjust, tweak, second-guess, and overthink just about every aspect of your husbandry regiment on a regular basis. There is no known cure for this particular affliction, and your only hope is short-term relief from purchasing either a new animal or a new piece of husbandry equipment. Recently while preparing my incubator for an expected 2020 clutch of eggs I found myself in this very situation, and decided to take a closer look at my temperature monitoring equipment.
Being a Chondro breeder I of course tried to imagine all the ways I could improve hatch rates if I could only better monitor my incubator temperatures. I already had an assortment of the usual tools of the trade such as digital proportional thermostats and handheld infrared temp guns. I had tried a variety of commonly available indoor/outdoor wired probe thermometers, assorted small digital thermometers available online or at reptile shows, and even an old-school glass thermometer. However, when it comes to thermometers I had never found one that I was truly happy with until now.
At the advice of a fellow reptile keeper on social media I decided to order a couple of the Govee units even though I wasn’t familiar with the company or their products. Govee (www.govee.com) is a relatively new German company founded in 2017 that manufactures intelligent devices with three main product lines: lighting, home security and thermometers. Their products are fairly inexpensive and readily available on Amazon plus their Mobile-App is free to download to your smartphone. I started off by ordering 2 units, the H5051 Wi-Fi Thermo-Hygrometer and the H5074 Bluetooth Thermometer & Hygrometer. The devices arrived quickly and both the packaging and devices appeared very sleek and modern. Both units interface with the App which allows data logging along with functions such as alerts if temperature conditions are outside set limits.
Setup of both units was super easy, only took a few minutes, and batteries were included too. I decided to place the H5051 Wi-Fi unit in the main chamber of my incubator since it has a nice large LCD screen that displays both temperature and humidity in real time as well as a mounting bracket that provides a couple of options for display. The temperature units can be adjusted between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Using Wifi the H5051 unit interfaces with the Mobile App on my iPhone which allows me to monitor conditions inside my incubator from any place in the world I have internet access.
I placed the H5074 Bluetooth unit inside two of my egg boxes since they are rather compact (about the size of a key fob) and do not have a screen that could be damaged by the high humidity. This will allow me to observe any slight temperature variations between the two egg boxes. I also will be able to see any difference between the main incubator chamber and the egg boxes especially in later stages of incubation when the eggs start to produce heat of their own.
The thing about the Govee system that I like the most is actually the functionality of the Mobile-App including the data-logging feature which displays by device. I really like being able to view both current and historical temperature and humidity data for each device including min, max, and average values. The data logging is charted graphically and can be displayed by hour, day, week, month or even year which will really be cool to look at over different seasons in the future. I was so impressed with the performance of the first two units; I quickly ordered several more of the H5074 Bluetooth units to utilize in a number of other applications in my collection.
The small size and light weight of the H5074 Bluetooth unit provides an endless number of new options for recording temperature and humidity data throughout my collection. Using the small lanyard included with the H5074 I was able to suspend one device from the perch of a newly setup PVC cage for my son’s GTP named “Feisty Pants”. By logging data for a few days before placing the animal inside the cage I was able to make some small adjustments to daytime and night-drop temp settings on the thermostat to compensate for the lower ambient temps in his bedroom. In another application I used a thumb tack through the lanyard and was able to suspend one of the H5074’s from the ceiling of my main snake room to collect data so I can better understand my ambient temp/humidity as well.
I have been using the two Govee models for a couple of months now and I continue to be very pleased with both the units and the Mobile-app. I am really enjoying the ability to see the additional data on my incubator, egg boxes and select cages all on my iPhone at any time. I can also see the Bluetooth unit being a helpful tool when setting up new cages or racks that need some fine-tuning before adding animals. I look forward to collecting more data over the coming weeks and months. I hope that having this type of data will prove helpful in making even more minor adjustments and tweaks to my husbandry routine to help provide a little short-term relief from my “Chondro Addiction” symptoms. So overall, I would highly recommend the Govee units and believe that they can help all keepers with monitoring temperature in incubators, cages and racks to improve husbandry.
Buy this model here – https://amzn.to/3qG02jN
