11 Hours Without Power

We lost power for 11 hours and the incubators were down the entire time, in the house and the house got down to 67 degrees. Outside it got cold and chicks that hatched Saturday night / Sunday morning were out in the garage and i was sure they died from exposure. I couldn't bring myself to go look so I decided to go look around and see how much wind damage there actually was to try and get a guess when the power would come back on. Before we got home the kids called us and told us we had power. When we got home I mustered up the nerve to go look at the chicks and to my disbelief not a single chick was lost. Still no loss and it got very cold out there.

I was thinking, wow these chicks are hardy and decided to cross my fingers that these eggs would hatch since the chicks lived through the cold. I have the eggs in the hatcher and they are at day 20. Chicks hatched at 19 days last time according to my calendar. What are the chances they will hatch and what about the rest of the eggs in the bator? Should I toss them if these ones don't hatch? I think this batch spent 3 more days in the incubator after the power outage. Next batch will be 10 ... and i have another batch that was just put in the day before the outage.

Thanks for any advice....

I think that your eggs should still be viable. They may take a little longer to hatch, and those that have not been incubated for long may be more affected. If they were mine, I would candle (in several days) those that are not due to hatch soon. Good luck.

sourland said:

I think that your eggs should still be viable. They may take a little longer to hatch, and those that have not been incubated for long may be more affected. If they were mine, I would candle (in several days) those that are not due to hatch soon. Good luck.

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Thank you sourland.

Woke up this morning at 5 am and heard peeps so I went to bed. When i got out of bed at 8 am there was only one chick. Now there are 4 and I see lots of piping going on. It's day 21 and we had a delay. Running these bators the same as we were for our Dorking chicks last spring and they always hatched at day 21. I'm guessing these chicks are just going to be early hatchers. Any thoughts?

Anyway glad to see chicks hatching after all that work and electricity. These chicks are ISA brown double back cross babies. We started with a Rhode Island Red and crossed him to our ISA Brown hens. Looking to create a whiter bird that hatches large eggs like Isa Browns and bigger eggs than the Ambers Link. When we started this project we didnt even know about the Ambers Link breed.

From here we are hoping to get mostly white hens to begin an in bred line of white birds. Who knows we may make a true breeding brown line also...

Getting carried away but i guess breeding can be part of hatching