Struggling to get humidity high enough

Yorkshire Coop said:

I'm not saying they are better but just another option. For me personally I find sponges don't create enough surface area of water for me at lockdown. But that's not to say they don't for other people as not all the same things work for everyone. I came across the evaporation pads when I got my Brinsea and humidity pump but they also work well in the base of my other incubator that I have to add water to manually.

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Okay, I was just wondering for my own knowledge base since I haven't seen that product before. I don't use sponges either, though other folks seem to like them so I'll mention them when talking about raising humidity. I find adding condiment cups or mise en place dishes (bigger than condiment cups but smaller than custard cups) a better way for me to control the amount of water surface area and I have better control of the humidity level since I can add or remove the cups as needed and they're deep enough that I can maintain humidity for a few days at a time without having to open the incubator or fuss with straws or tubes trying to refill them through the vent hole. I feel like I have better control doing it that way than trying to maintain a certain small humidity range using paper towels or wet dishcloths.

Maybe you can't get the strips in America. Yorkshire Coop is from England and so am I.
Thanks for the help AllynTal.

-Jet

Sorry I didn't post sooner.
Lots of the chicks hatched and were fine!!!! Some pipped and died though and quite a few needed an assisted hatch. 31 hatched in the end. They were a week old on Wednesday. A couple of the chicks that hatched didn't seem as strong and yesterday I went out and one of them had died. Other than that I now have 30 healthy chicks!

Thank you everyone!

-Jet

Jetblack2004 said:

Sorry I didn't post sooner.
Lots of the chicks hatched and were fine!!!! Some pipped and died though and quite a few needed an assisted hatch. 31 hatched in the end. They were a week old on Wednesday. A couple of the chicks that hatched didn't seem as strong and yesterday I went out and one of them had died. Other than that I now have 30 healthy chicks!

Thank you everyone!

-Jet

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Congratulations on your hatch

Sorry to hear you lost one though Was it one of those that had to be assisted?

Yes it was. Assisted hatches are always risky.

Hi and excuse me - I need to vent a bit first.

This is my 3rd year and 5th or 6th time incubating. Based on previous stressful experiences with a rather unstable thermostat which allowed the incubator temps to change according to changes in environmental temperature, this time I decided to incubate in the basement, after first measuring temperature there for a day and seeing that it stays quite stable. The basement air is more humid than at the ground level, although the air in my area is fairly humid generally, so I mostly do dry incubation (I also have a foam incubator, very similar to the one pictured in this thread). But every single time, no matter if I use water or not, the air cells are mostly too small at day 18. It happened this time too, even if the hygrometer inside the incubator showed much lower humidity (cca 30%) than the one outside (50-55%). From day 15 to 18, I put a cup of salt inside in hope it helps make the air cells bigger. That lowered the humidity to cca 20% and did help to enlarge air cells for at least some of the eggs.

At lockdown, I removed the salt, put a cotton cloth at the bottom of the tray, and, as I read that hatch rates improve if the eggs are in upright position, I put a little bit of cotton wool under each egg to raise the wider end of the eggs above the other. As half of the eggs still had air cells too small, I didn't add water in until 12 hrs later, but even after I added water, the humidity stubbornly stayed at 20% or even 18%. This morning was day 20 (actually this afternoon will be the real start of day 20) and I noticed an egg already pipped - at the wrong end! Of course I read everything about pipping at wrong end I could find. Then I filled another bottom compartment with water, but even that only increased the humidity to 25%. I'm scared to add more in case my hygrometer might be off and I make humidity too high (although when I took that hygrometer out to compare it to the one outside, it soon measured much higher humidity, although not as high as the one that was outside all the time. I put it back and soon it again showed 25%.

So I keep obsessing about how on earth can humidity inside be so low with outside humidity so high AND 2 full compartments of water? Every time before, if I filled all 3 compartments, the humidity would soon be 70-80%, and that was at the ground level with less humid air outside. Usually filling just one compartment would be quite enough. Is it possible that the cotton cloth and cotton wool suck so much moisture out of the air? It that's the case, it's too late to change that - it would take too much time as there are 47 well-developed eggs inside. I keep thinking of how many other chicks might have suffered the same fate of the one that pipped at the wrong end and might end up dead. And it's still not even full day 20.

An idea I had for incubating in the future - I think I shouldn't put very fresh eggs in, I should let them wait cca 7 days, so that the air cell has time to get at least a little larger. That might give the eggs a head start and perhaps reduce all that stress and last minute fixes at the end. In the meantime, I still have 2-3 days of nail-biting left.