Brinsea Maxi Ex lockdown humidity

[DonyaQuick]

I'm having a bit of a confusing situation with my Brinsea Maxi 24 Ex; it has the built-in humidity pump hooked up to an external water reservoir. There are 2 eggs in it currently and I'm a day into lockdown. The chamber is not being able to get all the way up to the 70% humidity that I set it to. It's running at 65-68% and draining a LOT of water from the external reservoir just to stay there. The air valve is at its lowest setting, which is all the manual suggets. I have a sensor in there confirming the readings, so I think it's basically running at its limit and can't go any higher. I have checked that the lid is well-seated. My room humidity is 30% which I know is contributing to the problem; not a lot I can do about that unfortunately, I mostly have to focus on keeping the room warm enough. Maybe I shouldn't be worrying with this particular incubator and the level it's holding at right now, but I had to raise it above 70% a couple times in the past with a different incubator to prevent shrink wrapping. With that other incubator, I would just pop in a warm wet paper towl to accomplish that if it was needed, but is that something I can do safely with the cardboard bottom in there? Or is there some other humidity-raising trick with the Brinsea that I'm missing?

For context, I started this incubation round with 14 eggs, and at pre-lockdown candling 12 showed nothing. Of the remaining two, I have one that definitely has a wiggling chick and another that is essentially un-candleable so I'm giving it hte benefit of the doubt even if I'm not really optimistic about it. I don't know if having just 2 eggs in there could be contributing to the humidity struggling.

 

[Tex452]

I don’t have a Brinsea, and I dry hatch only, I never had the problem with having just two eggs Left, the lowest I had was 8 fertile eggs from a friend that had one rooster on thirty hens out of 22, all 8 eggs hatched.
The humidity didn’t spike as high when the eggs started hatching as when the incubator was full, but I never add any water even at lockdown.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Ack - I've actually just discovered the reservoir looks like it's about to overflow. I'm going to have to try to drain some out...humidity still was capped at 68% in that state. I guess I have something going wrong...

 

[DonyaQuick]

I don’t have a Brinsea, and I dry hatch only, I never had the problem with having just two eggs Left, the lowest I had was 8 fertile eggs from a friend that had one rooster on thirty hens out of 22, all 8 eggs hatched.
The humidity didn’t spike as high when the eggs started hatching as when the incubator was full, but I never add any water even at lockdown.

I can't dry hatch...if I did the incubator would be <20% humidity and everybody would get shrink wrapped. I have also broody hatched in the past and stuck a sensor under the broody who manages to keep much better humidity under her.

 

[Tex452]

I can't dry hatch...if I did the incubator would be <20% humidity and everybody would get shrink wrapped. I have also broody hatched in the past and stuck a sensor under the broody who manages to keep much better humidity under her.

My humidity has gotten as low as 30% and I still had a 95% hatch rate.
If enough water isn’t evaporated out of the egg the chick will surely drowned.
My cousin had a very poor hatch rate, after many attempts, and most chicks would die soon after hatching, she said they were so wet, I recommended she try dry hatching and now she’s having great hatches.
From the videos I watched on dry hatching, they say as long as it doesn’t get below 15%, you are fine.
My humidity has never gotten that low so I can’t say if that is true or not, but I wouldn’t dream of hatching any other way than dry hatching, it has worked great for me.

 

[DonyaQuick]

My humidity has gotten as low as 30% and I still had a 95% hatch rate.
If enough water isn’t evaporated out of the egg the chick will surely drowned.
My cousin had a very poor hatch rate, after many attempts, and most chicks would die soon after hatching, she said they were so wet, I recommended she try dry hatching and now she’s having great hatches.
From the videos I watched on dry hatching, they say as long as it doesn’t get below 15%, you are fine.
My humidity has never gotten that low so I can’t say if that is true or not, but I wouldn’t dream of hatching any other way than dry hatching, it has worked great for me.

I was too tired to do math myself this evening, so I went to ye olde AI for some numbers to see what I would really be up against with a dry hatch...I asked "If air at 75F and 27% humidity is heated to 99F, what will the relative humidity be?" and the answer was: "(...) the relative humidity will be approximately 12.4%. (...) "

12.4% is pretty oof and might actually explain the past issues I had based on the 15% threshold. I may need to find some way to humidify the room a bit short term to get it up to 50% or so for safety if my incubator's water pump thingy could fail on me in this last few days...I've tried lowering the target humidity to 65% to put less strain on it. But without some extra source of water vapor, waking up to 20% humidity at 70F in the house is not unusual with the sort of weather going on at the moment.

I should have perhaps waited longer to fire up the incubator since in the summer the situation flips totally the other way and I often struggle to get my house to go below 80% humidity...I guess a summer dry hatch in my climate would be fine, just not a barely-into-spring one.

 

[NatJ]

I may need to find some way to humidify the room a bit short term

I was going to suggest that you try a humidifier in the room. Or if you don't have one, a few big bowls or pans of water in the room. Have you ever wanted an aquarium? That would also add humidity to the room.

With that other incubator, I would just pop in a warm wet paper towl to accomplish that if it was needed, but is that something I can do safely with the cardboard bottom in there? Or is there some other humidity-raising trick with the Brinsea that I'm missing?

I would probably not put anything wet directly on the cardboard.

But maybe you could put in a small plate, and put the wet paper towel on that. Or instead of a plate, use a jar lid, or the flat plastic lid from a container of sour cream, or anything else that will fit in the incubator and keep the wet paper towel from making direct contact with the cardboard bottom. I would go for something with very low sides, both because of airflow and in case a chick gets into it: I would want the chick to be able to get out again easily.

 

[Tex452]

I was too tired to do math myself this evening, so I went to ye olde AI for some numbers to see what I would really be up against with a dry hatch...I asked "If air at 75F and 27% humidity is heated to 99F, what will the relative humidity be?" and the answer was: "(...) the relative humidity will be approximately 12.4%. (...) "

12.4% is pretty oof and might actually explain the past issues I had based on the 15% threshold. I may need to find some way to humidify the room a bit short term to get it up to 50% or so for safety if my incubator's water pump thingy could fail on me in this last few days...I've tried lowering the target humidity to 65% to put less strain on it. But without some extra source of water vapor, waking up to 20% humidity at 70F in the house is not unusual with the sort of weather going on at the moment.

I should have perhaps waited longer to fire up the incubator since in the summer the situation flips totally the other way and I often struggle to get my house to go below 80% humidity...I guess a summer dry hatch in my climate would be fine, just not a barely-into-spring one.

You will never know until you try it.
I dry hatch late winter, spring and summer, I don’t hatch in the fall because of hunting season, and I go from one ranch to another to hunt and spend some time with family and friends, but as soon as hunting season is over I get the itch to start hatching again.

 

[DonyaQuick]

I was going to suggest that you try a humidifier in the room. Or if you don't have one, a few big bowls or pans of water in the room. Have you ever wanted an aquarium? That would also add humidity to the room.

I've just moved a 5gal water bucket into the room with an old aerator and heater rated for 25gal. Warm water should help...I was not wanting to close the door to the room if I could help it but I guess I have to at this point since the ambient house humidity is currently going down in response to the cold outside.

I do actually have two saltwater aquariums and a freshwater shrimp bowl, but they are all in a part of the house that is actually rather thermally unstable, so I would never want to have an incubator next to them. The aquarist version of "chicken math" is "multiple tank syndrom"...so now there is the possibility of "but it's a humidifier" to enable both addictions at once LOL.