Ridiculously high humidity

[Moonstream27]

Hi! I’m incubating for the first time and just locked down my eggs yesterday on day 18. I was incubating at 50% humidity for the first 18 days. Now that we are locked down I raised the humidity to 70%. One day later the cardboard in the bottom of the incubator is soaked and the humidity is rising. I bumped the humidity down to 60% but a few hours later it had gone up to 73%.

Since it’s only day 19 and no external pips, I tried opening the unit for a moment to get the humidity down and removed the tubing from the water. Still only down to 69%.

Any ideas? Should I take out the cardboard and replace with dry paper towels? Just give it some time? I figure this is pretty much the last day I can open the unit sooooooooooo am I SOL?

 

[Moonstream27]

I’m using Brinsea Ovation28ex btw. I emptied out the reservoir since it turns out it was overflowing. I’m hoping it won’t go higher at this point. I had to lift an egg to empty the reservoir and it started chirping at me (I almost died!), so I assume that means they’ve internally pipped. I’m hoping removing the excess water did the trick since I do NOT want to open the incubator anymore (didn’t want to today but )

 

[McChooky]

Update?

 

[Moonstream27]

Good news! The incubator held steady at 60% overnight. We had a bunch of eggs externally pip! Around 4 o’clock a batch started hatching, we’ve got 6 chicks in there now with 5 more eggs I can see that pipped. I don’t have really great views of the others since the chicks kicked/rolled a bunch of the other eggs to the edges…

I’m a bit concerned that we had 6 and the others are still taking their time but I’m trying to remind myself we are only on day 20.