Bat House Project

[reality_boy]

Thank you for taking the time to look over my project. You raise good questions, hopefully I can try to answer some of them to the best of my ability.

First the house you are showing is considered a poor design by current standards. Both because it is too small to house a nursing colony, and because it lacks enough variance to allow the bats to find there ideal temperature in any weather condition. The current recommendations call for at least a 24 foot square house with 2-4 chambers, that is a substantial thing!

An alternate design is called a rocket box, it is basically the above house wrapped around a pole. This is nice because it is simpler to mount away from a building and it tends to be simpler to construct as well. Rocket boxes tend to keep the same internal volume as traditional houses, they just build up rather than out. My larger bat house design mirrors one common rocket box design in size and livable volume.

How rough to make the sides of the house is a big unknown. Right now I'm using horizontal groves to increase the roughness, but there are probably more efficient textures that would both use less materials and be faster to print. My design requires the walls to be around 4 mm thick, rather overkill otherwise.

As for material, I'm using as little material as I possibly can without compromising the integrity. I am fairly new to 3D design, so I'm sure someone else could optimize the design even better, but I have tried many variations in an effort to reduce the material count. The truth is that this is a really large print. However I am aware that getting this shrunk down so it only takes one spool of filament would go a long way towards making others interested in printing it.

I'm experimenting now with ways to improve the insulation on the house. I think what I have now is actually holding up fairly well. At least if my thermos test from above is to be believed. The house is nearly as good at keeping the bats cool as the thermos is in direct sunlight. At night the thermos seems to have the advantage, but in my defense I left the lid on it, so it was not open to the night air. I suspect paint is going to matter more than anything, but I do need to build a wooden bat house for comparison to see if I'm in the right ball park or not.

Finally, my hope is to find some bats to validate this all with, and redesign as needed if it does not hold up. My goal is the bats, not the house. If it is not helping bats then there is little point in publishing the design. That is why I am being cautious and holding off on releasing the stl files. I don't want to release a bad design into the wild.