First Time Incubating. Please help!

I got this today. I'm not sure if it's a good brand but it's the best I could afford at the moment. I hope it'll work. I just need to figure out how to use it properly and probably buy more since these are potentially fried but I'll know more this week.

MTRChickens said:

I got this today. I'm not sure if it's a good brand but it's the best I could afford at the moment. I hope it'll work. I just need to figure out how to use it properly and probably buy more since these are potentially fried but I'll know more this week.

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They are a pain in the butt, but you can make them work. Don't rely on the digital display for thermometer or hygrometer. Have your own checked/accurate thermometer and hygrometer inside the incubator. Many people have to set the incubator 2 degrees or more higher on the display to get it correct inside. And the hygrometers are often useless. If you adjust for those two things and keep an eye out for temp spikes, you can have decent hatches.

The biggest issue unless they changed it with this incubator is the temp probe is attached to a sheet of plastic.

Everytime you open or turn the eggs it never resets to the exact spot under the heater element. So it will cause temp swings and variations.

I took mine off the plastic sheet and zip tied to the other wires in the lid. That way I could bend and place the probe where I wanted it at under the incubator heater.

A few tip/tricks that may help.

Run low humidity during incubation.

When you turn the eggs put lid back on turned 180 degees. So heat is distributed to each end of the incubator.

Don't trust the gauges on it. Always verify with a accurate thermometer and hydrometer.

Rotate eggs from the outside toward the middle and the middle to the outside.

They are a tempremental incubator but they can be used to get decent hatches.

Good luck

Thank you for the advice! I finally got it turned on and working (loose wire) but yes, I'll be adding my own gauges.

Tonight is my day 17, I went to candle the three eggs. Two were the same, the third is totally different. Two had air sacks at the big end and the rest of the egg you can't see through. The flashlights are very good either. The third one is similar but a little bigger air sack but I see a bubble? I move it around carefully wondering if it got cooked unintentionally but the fluids are moving. I'm going to leave then alone now but am I on the right track or did I lose them?

Not being able to see through most of the egg is a good sign at day 17, as it means you've got big chicks in there taking up most of the space. I would check for movement if I were you, assuming your flashlight is good enough to see well.

Is it possible they'll hatch earlier? One egg has a weird color dot on it that wasn't there prior to incubation. It looked like a stain or something. I checked for cracks but so far nothing.

They could. I've had quite a lot of chicks hatch out on day 19 when I incubate.
A weird colored dot on the egg could be a sort of bruise, which isn't the greatest sign because it likely means the chick broke a blood vessel inside the egg; I've never had any die from that, but others have.
It could also possibly be a spot of what I assume to be rot; when I was a kid, my family had ducks and they'd nest wherever they liked around the yard. Then, after some ducklings had hatched out, they'd just leave the remaining eggs for dead. Many times we would go out there to find that one or more of those eggs were still alive, so we would bring them in and hatch them. Sometimes they'd have odd spots on them, which seemed to be isolated areas of rot -they were odd greenish slime once the chick was out and we could see- but they didn't seem to harm the chicks much. We even had one egg/duckling with maggots on it once; we gave it an immediate bath and it was okay after that.
I can't think of any other options for what a newly strange colored spot on an egg could be.