Check your thermometers.

[V8muscle]

So out of about 100 chicken eggs 1 hatched... A rooster... That got eaten by a hawk a month later... Then I tried quail. 120 eggs none hatched... Another round of quail with a couple turkey eggs we found (cutting hay we ran over the nest and killed the mom 9 survived) guesstimated hatch date would be around the fourth so I set the quail eggs to hatch and lockdown at the same time. So I figured why not and I threw them in there. Today I noticed at the top of the alcohol?(red liquid) thermometer about a half inch of liquid. Somehow the liquid had separated and some stayed at the top. I went and threw another thermometer in there and it read 105.

I got the incubator and thermometer from my landlord for free and all the eggs were from his dad for free. So I don't have much of a loss accept the disappointment of nothing hatching.

Oddly enough when you "calibrate" it with ice water it reads 33f

Moral of the story check your equipment even if it calibrated fine. If I had of looked at the top of the thermometer I would have seen the impending doom, however, we live and we learn.

 

[AmyLynn2374]

So out of about 100 chicken eggs 1 hatched... A rooster... That got eaten by a hawk a month later... Then I tried quail. 120 eggs none hatched... Another round of quail with a couple turkey eggs we found (cutting hay we ran over the nest and killed the mom 9 survived) guesstimated hatch date would be around the fourth so I set the quail eggs to hatch and lockdown at the same time. So I figured why not and I threw them in there. Today I noticed at the top of the alcohol?(red liquid) thermometer about a half inch of liquid. Somehow the liquid had separated and some stayed at the top. I went and threw another thermometer in there and it read 105.

I got the incubator and thermometer from my landlord for free and all the eggs were from his dad for free. So I don't have much of a loss accept the disappointment of nothing hatching.

Oddly enough when you "calibrate" it with ice water it reads 33f

Moral of the story check your equipment even if it calibrated fine. If I had of looked at the top of the thermometer I would have seen the impending doom, however, we live and we learn.

And Yes yes yes!!!! 2 years ago on my very first hatch, (incubator borrowed from my sister and free eggs from her flock) I bought a brand new thermometer/hygrometer and never checked it. Didn't even think about the possibility of it being that off. I had one survivor out of the 17 eggs that went into lockdown, and he hatched on day 24. I was told to check my thermometer, so I did. SIX degrees off. I never use less than 2 therms in my incubator (usually 3). Never had a rotten hatch like that again. It's a hard lesson to learn and like you, I wasn't out the $ except the rotten thermometer price, but it's such a dissapointment to put 21 days of care onto the little lives to get next to nothing. And ours was for a school unit. We loved the little guy we had, but it was sad just the same.