Carlswani
In the Brooder
- Sep 27, 2017
- 16
- 18
- 34
i purchased a cheap Chinese 56 egg incubator with built in chandler which turns out after the first hatch attempt is running around 3 degrees cooler than the thermostat says. To combat this I’ve put my own thermometer (which also measures humidity) in and a second one for good measure. The second time around I purchased 18 eggs silkie and frizzle mixed and threw 2 eggs from my own chickens in (silkie x). I couldn’t get the temperature perfect it mostly sat on the desired 37.6 but I had to manually adjust it often so found it would sometimes get as high as 38.4 in the day (for no more than an hour at a time) and as low as 36.7 at night. I managed to hatch only one chick which also happened to be from my own flock. The rest developed normally and some started to internally pip but none externally pipped. Humidity was kept around 40% and raised to 70% during lockdown. Would it be plausible that my eggs are free range and being fed fruit and veg scraps making the chick a whole lot stronger than the purchased eggs that really come from a chicken farm (3x2m caged with 6 chickens & 2 roosters per pen) or was it pure luck that I got any chicks at all? I don’t know weather to try again or not :-/