Are my duckling eggs dead???

[BigWeenMachine]

Ugh, I am just bewildered and lost. I've been fighting thermometers for 3 days now. I've got 5 thermometers in the incubator alongside the digital one on the incubator. After readings all over the place on all the thermometers I awoke today to find all 5 backups read 96 or lower. Throughout the day I continued to bump up the temp on the incubator to try and get the thermometers to get up to 99.5 until finally I bumped it from 103 to 105 on the incubator setting.

After an hour, still no change in any of the thermometers inside. With the incubator blinking crazily at me to turn the temp down I finally pulled out the three bulb thermometers. I turned one rightside up, instead of flat on its side, and left it in the bator and then checked the other two with a glass of ice water. The two I took out were both stuck at 94 degrees until I shook them and stuck them in water. The one I put vertical quickly rose to 104 degrees. I guess they all stuck from being on their sides????? Not sure how all of them could do that at the same time.

So I reduced my incubator temp to 99.5 and low and behold the temp on the bulb thermometer inside came down. Fittingly, the two other digital thermometers I had in the bator never changed from 95 degrees during the entire day of fiddling with the temp. It appears that the incubator was right all along yet somehow 5 other thermometers were wrong. I am utterly baffled.

Question is, are my ducks inside dead from being at 102 degrees or higher for the last 14 hours??? I have one batch on day 8 and one batch that I just put in this morning inside the incubator.

 

[BigWeenMachine]

There is a smell I have not noticed before coming from the incubator as well. Smells almost like after birth mixed with eggs.

 

[BigWeenMachine]

Never mind. This garbage incubator finally managed to fry these eggs. Woke up this morning to see 110 degrees on a thermometer in it. So hot it actually melted the bulb away from the plastic it was glued to so who knows how hot it actually got. Held an egg to my eyelid and the **** thing practically branded my eye from being so hot. NEVER BUY A FARMERS INNOVATOR INCUBATOR, specifically the 4250 model. Worked fine for the first 6 days and then as soon as I candled and found a dozen chicks the **** thing went haywire and I did nothing but fight with it for 3 days trying to stabilize it and still couldn't get it to work. So mad right now.

 

[beetandsteet]

SO sorry for your loss. Those digital cheap styrofoam incubators are horrible. I use an older analog Little Giant styrofoam incubator and it works fine. IMO you should the manufacturer and tell them about what happened, maybe even get your Also with that much variation in Thermometer temp I'd check to see if your thermometers are even accurate. Sounds like hot and cold spots in the incubator too.

 

[BigWeenMachine]

Well it wasn't a complete loss thank god. Out of a total of 18 ancona eggs, and 9 mixed breed eggs that I had in that incubator I have 11 and 6 developing nicely. I bought an old used Lyon incubator and moved all those eggs into it. That thing has been steady as a horse the last 2 weeks and sure wish I had it to start with. I just hope I don't have problems with the chicks when they hatch. There could still be a bunch that die or come out deformed so I guess I will start finding out next week when the first 6 mixed breeds start to hatch. Anconas will be a week later.