Update. The Great Debate: Is it the incubator or the egg?

This is an update to an earlier thread where I promised to post the results of my hatching attempts with eggs from my own hens.  Just to recap the highlights of that thread.  I ordered $300 dollars of hatching eggs through the mail over a period of a couple months.  I used a Hova-bator 1588 as the incubator.  Out of about 75 eggs, I only had 6 hatch out.  After much debate and examining all possibilities from every angle we narrowed the culprit down to either the eggs or the incubator.  So, I decided to incubate some eggs from my own chickens to eliminate the eggs as one of the possibilities.

Okay, so here are the latest results.  G.Q.F (the maker of the 1588) sent me a brand new 1588 with digital LCD, and this is what I used to incubate my eggs this time around.  I kept the humidity around 45 to 50 % as recommended by G.Q.F.  The temperature remained pretty stable at 100 degrees the whole time. I gathered the eggs for five days and put them in the incubator on March 26th (15 eggs).  I continued to gather eggs and put another batch in the incubator on April 4th (27 eggs).  This was the only time the incubator was opened until last Friday (April 13th) when I moved the first batch to the hatcher, which is my first 1588.  

I candled all the eggs on Friday when I had the incubator open.  19 out of 42 were clear and 3 quit very early on.  So 50% of the eggs were bad.  Of the first batch of 15 eggs only 8 were developed and moved to the hatcher.  Only 3 of the 8 have hatched.  I will move the remaining 13 eggs to the hatcher on Friday.

So the final result is that, so far, I have had a 20% hatch rate with my own eggs vs a 9% hatch rate with shipped eggs.  I don't know about you, but I don't consider either of these to be a successful hatch rate by any stretch of the imagination.  The question now is; what went wrong?

Looking only at the results from the first 15 eggs.  8 out of 15 eggs did develop fully, but only 3 out of 8 hatched.  If all 8 would have hatched, that would have been a 60% hatch ratio, which I would have been happy with.  There are too many variables to determine why all 15 eggs did not develop .  So let's deal with what we know. 8 fully developed eggs went into the hatcher and only 3 hatched.  The hatcher was stabilized for days at 100 degrees and 65% humidity before the eggs went in and was stable during lockdown.  Why did the other 5 eggs not hatch?

I need to figure out what went wrong before Friday, because I have another 13 eggs on the line and I really want these eggs to hatch.  Not only am I really tiered of waiting three weeks to see only a few chicks come out of my efforts, but these particular eggs come from my special game hens that I am trying to breed.

END RESULT UPDATE:

Bump!

Quote:

Originally Posted by madamwlf 

The one thing I see wrong is your humidity is too high for day 1 to 18.  Have you tried a dry hatch???  I put no water in at all for the first 18 days.  It usually stays around 20% depending on the humidity outside.  On day 18 they are moved to lock down and humidity is bumped to 60-65%.  I think your chicks are probably drowning during lock down because they haven't lost enough moisture during incubation.

I have tried the dry hatch method with no change in hatch ratios (with shipped eggs).  The air cells looked perfect on day 18 when they were moved to the hatcher.  All this was covered in the previous thread.  It is extremely dry here where I am and you have to add humidity or it will get down to 5%.