BIG humidity issue, are they beyond help?

[firedove]

I set 17 eggs on Feb 27. My hygrometer was reading low so I kept raising the water bottle that feeds the incubator. Yesterday morning I noticed droplets of water on the dome of the bator so yesterday afternoon I bought a new hygrometer. I put the new Hygrometer in after dark, sure enough the old one was reading wrong, very wrong, the new one read 96% humidity! I removed the eggs from the bator and dumped out all the water from the wells. Put it back together and turned the bator back on. I turned off all the lights and candled the eggs, I can see early development in most (and I am usually hard pressed to see anything until much later in the hatch, I just don't have the eye for it usually), but there are NO visible air cells anymore

I'm 5 days into incubation, is it just too late and it's a failed hatching attempt (give up now?) or is there a way to still bring the eggs around? If there is a chance of still hatching them, where does the humidity have to be to dry the eggs enough but not too much?

 

[Nava]

i keep mine at around 35 to 40 then on the last 3 days i raise it to 60 to 65 if i were u i would keep the eggs in there.

 

[firedove]

Thanks Nava

Right now I have them at 30% since the humidity had gotten so high I wanted to dry them out a bit. I just added a little more water so I'll check again in a half hour and see where it's at. I'm used to keeping them around 50% for the first 18 days of the incubation but I will try 35% for now and see how the air cells do after completely saturating them with moisture early on.

 

[Gypsy07]

From what I understand, humidity issues are much less likely to cause problems than temperature issues. Especially this early on in the incubation. Get your humidity down but don't stress too much over it. I'd say don't worry about the exact size of the aircell till about day 14, but check it then and adjust humidity as required if it looks too big or too small so you've got things as good as possible for going into lockdown.

My first go at incubation I didn't have a hygrometer and I weighed the eggs to check progress instead. I guessed humidity levels and still got a reasonable hatch rate.

Good luck!

 

[OrpingtonManor]

Here's a good read on humidity, authored by the resident pirate ....
http://amazingchickens.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-weight-loss-method-of.html

 

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

Quote:
That guy's kind of a kook.

 

[firedove]

Thanks for the link to the Pirate blog

I've got humidity holding at 35% now so I think that's where I will leave it. The way my bator is built the side bottle keeps hydration constant so there is never an add water stage. When I need to raise the humidity at hatch time I just change the height of the bottle to let more water in. I've never had an issue with hatch rate in this bator, I was just concerned with the humidity so high for the first 5 days of hatch that I could dry them enough in time to be good for hatch.