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ilex
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| Joined: | Wed Jan 18th, 2006 |
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Posted: Tue Feb 7th, 2006 04:57 pm |
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Any experiences in using pvc pipes to build bat houses?
It should be fairly easy to build a rocket house from a pvc pipe. It would also be fairly easy to insulate it by using 2 pipes, one iside the other and filling the intermediate space with vermiculite or whatever... cheap and easy to deal with.
Last edited on Tue Feb 7th, 2006 04:58 pm by ilex
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Joe Spencer
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| Location: | Massachusetts USA |
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Posted: Wed Feb 8th, 2006 03:21 am |
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Indeed and yes BCI and BHF member Marvin Maberry has made pvc bat houses though designed slightly differently than what I believe your proposing. The challenge is to have the correct sizing of each readily available pvc layer for crevices and the gripping of partitions by bats of which there are a few materials which have been used successfully. More here:
http://www.maberrybat.com/sandbox2.htm
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ilex
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Posted: Wed Feb 8th, 2006 10:37 am |
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Very interesting, specially that bottom image. I thought bats would like to be able to move around. Those pvc pipes look very narrow. I'm sure a lot of bats can get into one of those, like in a LIFO queue (LIFO is last in, first out). But are they able to pass each other when inside one of those pipes?
Does anybody have the sizes of the pipes used?
I'm also very interested in how those pipes are treated so bats can get a hold to them. Using just pvc looks much easier than adding wood.
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LarryH
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Posted: Sun Mar 12th, 2006 01:45 am |
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I have two of the Maberry PVC bat houses, a "Belfry" Four-Tube EXT, and a "Belfry" Sand Box II, mounted on a 20' pipe. I put them up last spring in late March, and had bats in them by mid-April. I didn't get too many bats during the summer, but by the time they left in early October, there were about 50 -- a mixture of Little Brown Bats and Big Brown Bats.
The design of these houses allows the bats to move up and down in the tubes to find the best heat level. The sand-filled house had more bats during the spring and fall, but they preferred the other house during the hot summer nights. Apparently, the sand-filled house has a lot more stable temperature during the cool nights of the spring and fall, but stays too hot during the summer.
There is a picture of the houses posted in the Photo forum. I can't wait for the little bug getters to come back for the summer. I've really missed watching them come and go from the houses. And, for the first summer since we've lived here, we had no mosquitoes! Our neighbor enjoyed the bug-free summer so much, he now wants to put up his own bat houses.
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Gran
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| Joined: | Wed Sep 8th, 2004 |
| Location: | Dothan, Alabama USA |
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Posted: Sun Mar 12th, 2006 02:59 pm |
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I've just bought a PVC house from batmanagment. It has wooden dividers within a 10" PVC pipe. Seems like it is well built. I just have to get it mounted and wait to see what happens.
Here is a link.
http://www.batmanagement.com/Ordering/batboxes/batcan/batcan.html
Last edited on Sun Mar 12th, 2006 03:03 pm by Gran
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