Not enough of information are provided but maybe someone here may have the reason why..........

I rather talk about experiences and history ( I wish others will share their experience and history with me as I also can learn from their success and failure).

Once, I was offer 2 3S.BHs ( both 2 years old) and both at almost the same price. The difference is that A BH has 58 nests and only 10 nests at the upper floor but B BH has 45 nests but only 4 nests at the lower floor...........I bought B at a slightly more expensive price as I believe that A BH is normal as so there is nothing much I can do to greatly increase the nests  but B BH has some problem as the birds prefer upper floor which has the most problem..........so there must be something at the lower floor that discourage the birds to stay and yet they stay at the upper floor......meaning that the BH has great potential and this I like the best. No point wasting my time over A as the increment may not be to my liking as surely enough, by simple modification, I manege to increase the birds population to afew hundreds in a year time...........God of swiftlets must be good to me.

The very reason that I bought was  because the area is a core area having so many BHs with over thousand nests and these 2 BHs failed......since one is normal in the distribution of nests but  the second one must got potential according my thinking. Maybe, I am just lucky or am I right????

So, I wonder many must have failed BHs and hopefully share their experience with us so that we won't fall into the same situation. Just that we hope that we will not fall into the same trap and only you can help us..........like TF asked if any has used portion and which portion has proven to work cos the photo at their site may not be the truth but we trust our friends here more.

Once a friend did asked me to buy for him some portion and the first portion was good according to my friend but the repeated order by him bring no result at all and he though that I must have given him imitation portion as each 4 little cost afew hundreds; I never would want to buy it myself at the price but I have been accused of cheating my friend cos the smell also different lah.......so is this Malaysian way of doing buz .......first time OK and second time rubbish !!!! just like imported China products if you have heard of it.
Or anyone used duck eggs or seaweed ...hahaha and maybe work ...... tell us only if it doesn't work cos it would be a waste to try again...

Oh! the duck eggs and seaweed are only jokes because long ago someone did mentioned in his site on them so I mentioned it as a joke lah.
Maybe by slim changes that it may work but I rather not try and if anyone has tried and I believe that someone must has tried it, do let us know the outcome.

I have no problem with upper floor got nests and lower floor no nest as I find it that lower floor is easier to manage than top floor (after the first teething year) but then the birds will definitely visit and stay in upper floor first (@ suitable location) in most of the cases and if you do your BH well, the lower floor will very soon be more than the upper floor unless your upper floor is manage perfectly well. If you have birds staying at the upper floor first, that's normal in  most of all cases but in a long run, the lower floor will present a better living environment and condition to the birds and in some beautiful managed BHs, we see equally amount of birds staying.

Most of the problem that the bird did not visit the lower floor (from my experience only),

1. Your entrance to lower floor is not properly done in most of the cases that I have seen.
2. There is no sound attracting them to the lower floor.

Lower floor has lesser problem than the top floor which many here will tell you that any one of the basic requirements is difficult to solve at top floor. One of the top floor difficulties is to manage the ceiling heat wave and you may try to touch the ceiling in the hot afternoon and if you experience hot then how do you expect the birds to stay as instead of chicks, you got hard boiled eggs...hahahaha......so, remember that the first sign of birds staying is the top floor( in most of the cases) and at the better location of the top floor....that's my finding but hope to hear other comments on it. 

My experience to share @ forum with bird loving friends and wish to learn from them in the art of providing sanctuaries to swiftl

Thanks for your response.

In fact the west side ceiling is actually always hotter than the east side ceiling and yet there are nests on the west side. 

On the east side, most of the ceiling is about the same temperature but the sections near the east wall remains empty but the sections near the well(centre ) is occupied by many birds..

I'll monitor the temperatures more closely to see if there is a difference at the nesting planks.

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Added on September 11, 2010, 11:25 pm

Unfortunately you cannot mix tweeters of different resistance ie. ohms.

If you drive a normal piezo tweeter in parallel with a coil tweeter of 8 ohms, you will get no sound from the piezo tweeter  as all the current will be used to drive the 8 ohm component.

If you try to drive many 8 ohm tweeters in parallel, you'll likely blow your amp.

If you try drive many 8 ohm tweeters in series, you will get no sound. 8 ohms speakers need high currents to function but produce good bass sound.

Not all coil tweeters are 4 or 8 ohms.  Coils used in piezo tweeters are actually "crossovers" used to divert all the energy into the higher frequencies meant for the tweeter.

Look at the tweeter specs. carefully and it'll state the Ohms rating.

The beauty of high ohms piezo tweeters is that we can wire hundreds of tweeters together in parallel and get sound from them without blowing the amp.  Why ??  the total resistance of components in parallel is found by adding the reciprocal of each component eg. 1/r1 + 1/r2 +1/r3 = 1/R  where R is the total resistance of the components r1, r2, r3 in parallel.
so if r1=r2=r3=8 then 1/8 +1/8 +1/8 = 3/8 =  0.375 or approx. 1/3 so the total ohms will be approx. 3 ohms which will readily blow the amp up.

With a piezo which is about 4000 ohms 1/4000 + 1/4000 +1/4000 .......(for 100pcs) = 100/4000 = 1/40  so the total ohms  for 100 pcs of tweeters of 4000 ohms impedance  in parallel will be 40ohms. Most amps are designed to drive at a max current through 4 or 8 ohms so 40 ohms in this case will be the safe. Piezos need very little current to function.

There are many sorts of Motorola tweeters and some are actually coil driven, ie they rely on magnetism created by the coil when the amp current flows through it. Piezos are different in that the voltage across 2 crystal plates cause the plates to vibrate according to the voltage fluctuations.  You will find no magnet in a piezo tweeter. A coil driven tweeter will not last long in a BH.

Hope that helps.

Hi Tuckfook,

Any recommend brand and models of external and internal piezo tweeters?
Thanks.

Thanks for all comments; Tuckfook, Mfyapp and WW.

I still haven't  found a good piezo tweeter.
Most of them in the market gave voice at high frequency. If with condenser/capacitor, voice will be even higher.
I want speaker that can play at 1500 hz- 20000 hz., which will give more natural sound than only the high frequency sound.
Those magnetic speakers can cover the required frequency range, but there are at much higher price. Not easy to install them correctly too.

You are right mfyapp, if we can test the sound as it will be in the BH first, that should be the best way for speaker selection process.

Any recommendation for the right piezo tweeter will be highly appreciate.
WW tweeters, sound good, what is the specification?

Hi CWG,

Well said.

Looking at your bullet tweeter specification. I think it'll do a good job, considering it's frequency response.
What type of tweeter is it?
Is it with magnetic coil or is it a piezo type?
How can we use it as internal sound tweeter?

If I choose to use this one, my cost of internal sound tweeters will be 10 times more than the normal cheap one.

I am not that choosy with external tweeter as I think to attract birds to our house is not that difficult.
I think to lure them to stay and make nest is a very challenging step.
Apart from design, micro conditions and aroma, internal sound which included type of tweeter, installation method and position of tweeter are very very important.
I think with the right (not necessarily means expensive) tweeters, we might not need so many tweeters as people do now.

I saw from the CCTV that birds ignored bad tweeters and internal sound.
Many Sifu knew about this secret, but understandably, they wouldn't want to reveal it to newbie.
They would rather make $$$$ from it.

Some can be very successful with very low cost tweeters, no problem, so be it.
We, the late comer, need to find every other possible ways to make a short cut, if we can.

The problem now is to find the right one at the right cost to speed up the no. of birds and of course no. of nests.

Jalan Pasar............I have heard of it many time but I tried twice to go but fail and even my GPS fail me. How to get there, my friend and is it really good and I heard that this Jalan is a very long street so which part of jalan Pasar are selling good BH equipments and cheap lah.

To add to the tweeters subject....according to my laymen's knowledge, for good tweeters to preform well, you need good amplifier and good player, right? Annd annd what's good is MP3 sound with good sound system which I heard from expert, MP3 is flat with not much up and down and worse, after many recording, it losses some of the quality, right?

So, may our panel of electronic experts here kindly clarified to solve these; Are what I believe or heard correct or wrong.

Above, are meant for discussion and no offence, pls.

Below is the definition in Wikipedia of MP3. Once it is in MP3 format, I don't think duplicate can degrade the quality because it already in Digital format. As long as the size of the file is the same, the quality should be about the same. 

"The compression works by reducing accuracy of certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people. "

I planning to to use 2x5" good tweeter as my internal tweeter which cost slight expensive than Audax 60. I will only use some bullet tweeters to play Pulling Sound inside my BH.

To verify whether the tweeter is good or not, I have done a simple experiment. I play some samples sound with different tweeters. I then recorded using Digital recorder. After that, I use Audio software to extract the Freq response of the recorded waveform and compare to the original waveform. From there, we can visually tell which tweeter produce sound closest to the original sound. 

http://yenyen-swiftlet-farming.blogspot.co...echo-sound.html

http://yenyen-swiftlet-farming.blogspot.co...sting-ext1.html

The new BH is belong to my Brother in law and is just next to my current BH. The macro factor are the same except the design. So I can compare the results with my current BH. I will share the results whether the good tweeter is effective or not.

I am looking for Dark Red Meranti, anyone has reliable source with reasonable price? Btw, what is the current market price?

Thanks

Jz a tot about the sustainabilit of this industry....ie. how many bh can our natural environment support ?

It was mentioned somewhere that there is now some 120,000 bh in Malaysia. For a bh to generate a reasonable income you need to have say... 1Kg nest harvest per month. To have 1Kg nests per month a bh need to have 400 nests and jz a simple assumption of 2 birds per nest, you need 800 birds per bh. So for 120,000 bh to be successful you need to have 96million birds. Each bird requires around 5gm of insects per day. That works out to be 480 tonnes of insects per day. I dunno, but I think that is an enormous amount of insects.


Anyone out there knows how many tonnes of insects our forests produces per day?  and of these how many tonnes are the right sized insects for swiftlets. Then you factor in competitions for similar sized insects from bats, spiders, other birds etc.. You can roughly work out how many 1 Kg nests bh our natural environment can support.

Jackie Chow

after harvesting, how long can unprocessed bird nest last? given optimum storage condition.

Confirmed,  if you keep your EBN dry and well...they seem to last forever but make very sure that it's dry or otherwise, it will become moldy. Even moldy, is it safe to eat but then I did after flushing over running water and I survive and still healthy so I believe that it's safe unless any professional here do prove otherwise.

In bad time like now when the price is poor, you may want to keep the nests for future trading or at least when the price is better. Dry the nests well but make sure that you don't handle the nest while they are very dry or else you will break some of them and will also lose out. Unless you have a chiller and then you may put them into your chiller and will be able to preserve them without drying and infact, better if you wet alittle when place in the chiller as the chiller will dry the nests.

As for the Red Nest, you got to be very careful as alot in the market are man made color so it's not good for health. My think is that if you are buying birdnest, why not buy it at the purest form and that's white nests and then if you need minerals, add iron or calcium or any of others, add them in when cooking and they are relatively much cheaper that birdnests. With mineral in the nests, you can cook longer hour without dissolving the nests as the metal in the nest lower down the temperature of the nest.

Redness or other colors are because of the minerals found in the caves and food.  You are paying for the impurities which I think that you should and infact need to get discount instate of paying higher for it. But bearing in mind that the cave nests are more difficult to obtain, then to be fair, the same price should be right and with it, no one would want to add color to their nest to make it red or green for that matter. Red, green or white, the choice is yours, the consumers  and best if the price is the same. Am I right and been fair to all, BHs owners and cave nests collectors?

For those who want to try something new.....and have redness in their BH's nest, I believe that with oxidized metal water, you can create color nest in your BH. Red, blue and Green nests, any taker? I have found that iron with oxygen in air create redness in nests...

Regardless of political affiliations, any reasonably intelligent person can conclude that people should not fault progress but embrace it and move on. Giving freebies to the fishermen is simply vote buying and the fisher folk definitely know it and take advantage of it.  Any excuse is a good excuse for a handout, Federal or State is good, better both.

The 2nd. bridge is built across vast shallow waters know as the One Fathom Banks, never known for good fish catches for many years. The good fishing grounds are beyond Pulau Rimau, about 10kms away.  The dredging will in fact oxygenate the shallow muddy bottom and in the near future the harvest of clams will be very much improved.

On swiftlet ranches, the point taken must be that these establishments do create noise pollution. It is a nuisance if you have to live there.  Let us all be fair to our fellow citizens, biased reporting or not. 

These TV reporters do not know much about swiftlet ranching so they can only report on what is immediately visible, there were no details on the 1GP, so it was not possible to ascertain whether it was within the law or otherwise. It was not indicated how far the BH was away from the residence and whether the residence was in a residential area or agricultural lot.  Such shallow reporting is of course to be expected!

Thanks..........below is what I disagree all the time and why didn't  the Perhilitan take action for caging wild animal if Perhilitan still consider the swiftlets as wild. Or is it because they have "big and small eyes seeing only what they want to see"

(Malaysia Inside Caged Swiftlet Farming Pioneer
Perintis Industri Burung Walet Bersangkar
马来西亚籠式养燕先锋)


How can we caged up wild animal and worst, swiftlets which is free and need large area to feed and not on a man made diet presumably for the swiftlets ( What's really good and safe for the swiftlets in years to come)  and the authority cannot allow this to happen under their nose. Caged anmals bring with them caged diseases which will or may affect human being. Diseases from human/ ground to swiftlets and then swiftlets to human after mutation. Why cage up animals which are already migrating to our buildings and not in danger of extinction. I see no logic in it or is it just "Tipu Raayat" or tipu kerajaan.

My neighbour used containers because he did not have the initial capital.  He's a seasoned BH builder and thought that it might be cheaper to start with but now admits to having spent more than necessary.

The containers were stacked 3 high x 2 wide and 2 x long,  all covered with 3" styrofoam on the outside and then a layer of black netting.

There are several types of red bricks. The highly fired red bricks are not as porous as the less fired ones and the types made of red laterite and cement mix are the most porous.  By porous I mean that they absorb water and retain the water in the brick without leaching out.

Sand and cement bricks are the least porous in comparison and even though they readily absorb water, they do not retain it as long as the clay bricks.

I am using double layer red bricks (cement and laterite) with lime plaster on both sides.  lime plaster is more porous than 100% cement plaster. With this construction, my internal stable humidity is about 20% higher than external ambient all the time, thereby maintaining no less than about 75%Rh all the time without humidifier running. My humidifiers do not run most of the day. The gr flr. does not switch on at all so much so that I have to manually activate it to make sure it still works. Only the top flr. humidifiers run for about 30 mins in the evenings.

Insulation is not a problem as with porous bricks the water evaporates from the inside to the outside. As this happens, there is an appreciable temperature drop keeping the walls cool.  In wet weather the bricks absorb water to be saturated and that traps the heat inside stopping it from being too cold, when it is hot and dry outside, water evaporates and maintains the cool internal temperature. Of course the thicker the better but there are limitations as to how thick we can build a wall.

If you want physical heat insulation then use double wall with styrofoam sandwich but you will encounter internal condensation, and need good airflow control to be able to control the temperature.
Hope that is helpful.

More details are required. What exactly do you mean by double wall. How does the air flow through the wall. 

It will be best if you can provide an accurate drawing of your building incl the materials used.

The location with regards to the surroundings to about 5 miles radius will also be helpful as ambient conditions are very important.

It's a fruit flies culture where you can breed fruit flies in your BH to attract the birds. I once approached an agricultural research center to look for fruit flies culture supply but my intention was discouraged by the Prof of the center that breeding fruit flies and releasing it in the open in uncontrolled manner may cause devastating damages to fruits orchards in the surrounding area. The fruit flies breeding is also not suitable in town area environment because the fruit flies sudden present can be easily detected by your neighbor.  Remember BH golden rule to survive.....never provoke and create nuisance to your neighbor.