Bat House Project

[reality_boy]

Ideas

• Take temerature readings in the house to validate its thermal characteristics. I plan on comparing that to temperatures inside an inverted 5 gallon bucket and in an insulated thermos as a control. The idea being that we can't do much worse than the bucket and much better than the thermos.
• Investigate the temperature effects of paint, both dark and light. Also investigate roof coating to see if it has any benefits.
• Experiment with wall thicknesses and layer count to see if it has any impact on thermal or structural characteristics.
• Experiment with PETG to see if it is stronger or more temperature resistant.
• Experiment with different wall textures to see if bats cling to one better than another. I'm most interested in trying a lattice pattern and some sort of random texture.
• Experiment with adding in more cross bars for larger bats to hang on.
• Experiment with vertical baffles to help trap the air in an attempt to make more of a temperature gradient.

Work in progress

I have access to a 6 element temperature logger, I'm hoping to mount my prototype outside and begin profiling it. I want to verify that the tall design does in fact create a temperature gradient, and investigate paint and insulation among other things. I have heard that thermal mass is important in a bat house, it is difficult to add mass to a 3D print, but it may be that thicker walls will act as better insulators at least.I need to build a container to house my temperature probe. Mount my prototype outside and begin to collect data.I also need to find bats to work with. My hope is to get a hold of a bat rescue that will let me place sample prints in a cage with live bats to see if they are interested in my designs. It seems the fastest way to verify the questions about what wall texture is best.5-18-2019It's alive! I put the bat house up on a temporary post and went ahead and added my temp logger for some initial validation. Currently this is on a 10 foot poll that I cut in two to do the initial prototype work, so it is not nearly high enough off the ground. But it is much easier to reach the house this way, and it verifies that my pole clamps work as expected as well. My hope is to install this on a proper pole at some point in time, after validating the design.



Them temperature logger is just up temporarily, I wanted to get some base line data to see if it is working or not before making a more permanent install. This is based around an arduino uno with a real time clock and sd-card board, a LCD board for fun, and a custom built 6 element temperature probe and a light detector. The probes are accurate to within a single degree and we log both the real time temps and a rolling average to reduce noise once every 30 milliseconds.



I put an inverted thermos next to the pole with a single temp sensor placed at the very center of the container for validation. I figure the thermos is better insulated than anything I can 3D print so we can use this as a best case scenario. I added a second temp sensor to the outside of the thermos on the south side so it is in the shade. And I placed the light sensor at the top so we can see when the sun is on our house.Inside the house I have 4 sensors, one near the top and bottom of each chamber. These are not currently placed very ideally, the way I mounted the electronics limits how far up the top sensor can go. I will try to make a proper clamp for the electronics once I validate that this is running correctly and gathering meaningful data.



My next step is to start experimenting with the variables. I plan on printing with different thickness of walls, painting the exterior both black and white, and trying out some elastomeric roof coating on the outside as well. I don't expect the roof coating will have a significant improvement over white paint, but I want to verify that. The roof coating is rather expensive, so if it has no benefit it would be great to know that up front.I will probably make a cross bar for the pole with small spikes that i can mount test prints onto rather than messing with the prototype house. Hopefully that makes it simpler to iterate over designs and reduces the cost as well.