Brinsea Mini Advance Incubator

I have the mini advance II and I love it. I basically just plug it in and add water every day. My first hatch was 100%.

Just FYI Tractor Supply has this unit markdown from 219$ to 54$. I bought one yesterday and I do not even have a chicken set up yet. Working on it but I could not pass it by.

An excellent incubator. It provides a very stable environment, and is fantastically easy to use. It provides good hatch rates, even for birds with very high embryo mortality(like seramas.). My only complaint is that if drying chicks make a break for freedom, then their toes can get pinched. If the bottom half had higher sides, then this wouldn't be an issue. 10/10 would recommend.

3 years ago i decided to incubate eggs for the first time and wanted a small incubator, so this is what i got. i love the fact that you can watch the eggs hatch and the water is covered to keep chicks from drowning. i will never get another incubator unless i need to hatch a huge amount of eggs in that case i would most likely get another Brinsea incubator. I LOVE this incubator.

Great incubator and hatched all most of the eggs we incubated inside it.

Absolutely a great buy! We had an excellent hatch without a humidity monitor, without monitoring temps, without stressing! We watched every moment of every egg hatching, and it was absolutely magical! I'd recommend making sure yours has the OUTSIDE water reservoir to fill. That made it so easy to see when we needed to add water. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I had used my Brinsea Mini Eco 4-5 times when it started this horrible screeching when turning. I noticed the gear that is part of turner was all rusted up. I contacted customer service, and my unit had just gone out of warranty so they refused to replace anything. Customer service rep was short with me. I proceeded to contact them by email so I would have a record of the conversations. I finally convinced them to send me a new motor for the turner, after about 10 exchanges and pointing out to them that Incubator Warehouse has sent me multiple replacement parts when I needed them. For the price you pay, the Brinsea products are not a good value. I now buy only from Incubator Warehouse because they have excellent, fast and reliable customer service as well as great products.

After reading all the glowing reviews of this incubator, and after using it twice, I'm very disappointed with the design. There was no way to top off the water during lockdown and I lost two fully developed chicks, I complained to Brinsea by email, no response. I wrote the same thing on fb, then they went out of their way to send me a new bottom tray that does let you fill the water during lockdown. Why didn't they offer me this option when I told them about my negative experience by email?

It's also extremely hard to clean in my opinion. The top portion where the fan is isn't easy to clean even after you screw off the clear plastic piece on the bottom. After taking it apart and looking at how it was put together, it's such a kludge. Tape holding things together, how long will that hold up?

How does this tiny, expensive incubator get glowing reviews? Fresh Eggs Daily & Chicken Chick like it. Mine will be for sale after this current hatch.

Poor design, not enough room for the hatched chicks. Adding water to the tiny cup in the middle is a challenge.
It fogged up and made observations difficult.

I have had nothing but success with my Brinsea Mini Advanced. This will be my fourth hatching season with it running for at least six consecutive weeks, and it still works great! (Although the fan does rattle a little more than it used to.)

I would highly recommend this to hobby hatchers anywhere!

A Brinsea Mini was my first incubator and it will be my last too. It is a high quality small incubator for the backyard hobbyist; no, you can't hatch a ton of chicks out of it, but it's ideal for folks who just want to keep small flock numbers up or have some fun with hatching eggs! Temperature control and turning modes are totally digital. Humidity is not, however I have found keeping the humidity up in a Mini simpler than trying to calibrate it in an incubator with automatic humidity - simply fill one of the wells up every couple days. The incubator is made of a tough and durable plastic, and makes it very easy to view the eggs as they hatch! It is easy to clean as well.

I have only ever had one issue with this incubator - after about 5 years of use, the transformer cord wore out. I ordered a new one for about $15 from Brinsea and now my baby's up and running again. Other than that, it has been perfect from the day I got it.

My sister and I used this incubator IN OUR ROOM! It was small enough that it fit in a corner. We put 7 eggs in it and 6 of the cutest baby bantams hatched (the other egg was not even fertile)! The only problems with this device was that when I would attempt to close the lid to keep the chicks warm and dry, the lid wouldn't close! I looked down and one of the chick's heads was stuck!!! This happened twice and I came very close to crushing one's head one time! Thankfully they were all fine. After we removed the chicks from the incubator, it was moldy, dirty, stinky, and just descusting. It wasn't hard to clean though. Overall it is a pretty good incubator and I will use it again.

I put 7 bantam eggs in the incubator. I got pretty worried at day 15 and made a bet with my sister that if none hatched, she would give me 1$ and if any hatch, even if there was only one, I would have to give her one of them. And guess what? 6 of the 7 eggs hatched! I will definitely use this incubator for my next hatch!

I owned this incubator for 2 weeks before it broke, in the middle of a hatch.
I set the temperature and it never remained consistent, humidity was horrible!!!!

I have done three hatches in my brinsea mini advance so far. I bought mine with an addition thermometer/hydrometer which was a great decision. Setting up the brinsea was simple. The directions are clear, and the process is easy.

If you don't have a separate thermometer, I'm not sure how you would calibrate this incubator. I calibrated the bonus thermometer and then used that to check the temperature in my incubator. My brinsea was two degrees colder than the readout said. If I had not calibrated it, I'm not sure my hatch would have gone well. For the money, I would have expected it to be pre-calibrated. It does hold temperature very well once you have it where it needs to be. However, if your power goes out there is little to no insulation and it gets cold rapidly. It also had a cooling feature which I really like adn an alarm in case the temps go to high or low.

The turner is very veritile as far as options for how often and how many degrees you want your eggs turned. It's very easy to program and very convenient. I however had problems with the turner itself. There were always one or two eggs that I could not get to turn, no matter how much I fiddled with them. One of my hens lays a longer pointy egg, and I never got it to turn properly. That was VERY frustrating. Again, for the cost of the machine I expected it to be much smoother operating and am very disapointed. I would not recommend this for larger eggs or nonstandard shaped eggs. I also purchased the small egg disk for serama eggs, and it worked fine.

The humidity cannot be fine tuned, and there is no hydrometer built in. I did not have a problem with it (I monitored air cells and used the little extra thermometer/hydro) and following the directions gave me fine results. However I can see this being a problem in a very dry or humid area.

All in all I would NOT purchase this again. It's a decent incubator, but not worth the cost.

Got through one season before the motor died. Transformer went soon after. Customer service was not responsive, but they are very willing to sell you replacement parts. On a year old machine I find this ridiculous. If you are going to have a premium priced product (for a 7 egg incubator), you should have the workmanship to match. I'm done with Brinsea.

I have used this incubator 4 times now, and every time I get every egg to hatch except for one that never forms! This incubator is great to have if you have a small flock, and plus once you set it you don't need to do anything else until lockdown! I'm very happy with this incubator. I might replace it with the bigger version soon because my flock is expanding. Here's some pictures of my hatches in it.













Another thing that I really like about this incubator, is the clear round opening all around it so that you can see the hatch whenever you want without opening up the incubator.

When I purchased the Mini Advance, I assumed that it was calibrated from the factory! It appears that this is not so. The eggs came from my girls and were about as fresh as can be, and loaded them in the incubator. I measured the eggs weights throughout the process and the eggs were losing the appropriate amount of weight throughout the incubation process. Everything was going perfectly!
Unfortunately the results were horrible! Out of 7 eggs, only 4 hatched, three of which did not look good at hatch time 2 subsequently died the next day. Another one had pipped but must have died just after the first pip because that was as far as that one went, and the other 2 were fully developed but never pipped must less hatch. I could not understand why I had such a terrible hatch. The only thing I could think of was that the temperature was not right so, I purchased a spot check thermometer and compared it to two other thermometers that I knew were dead on. The spot check was accurate! After the hatch I checked the temperature and I discover that the temp, 20mm above the turner, is only 98.1 degrees as opposed to the 99.5 that the unit was reading throughout the hatch. All of a sudden I see why the bad hatch and it all makes sense. I have two other friends who just purchased the same unit and their Mini 7's were also not calibrated from the factory. One read 98.1 (purchased 3/2015) and the other read 102.3 (purchased 4/2015). They both also had terrible first hatches, which is understandable considering the temperatures were so way off. You would think that Brinsea, selling a near $200, 7 egg incubator, would have at least had the courtesy of calibrating the units prior to shipping. Brinsea should at least advise their customers that the units are not calibrated from the factory and encourage the buyer to buy a thermometer of some sort or better yet, calibrate the units at the factory. What a disappointment! Do yourself a favor. When buying one of these over priced incubators, consider dropping another $20 so you can check that the temperature is correct because you can be **** sure that Brinsea did not calibrate the unit prior to leaving the factory.