Just having a white dot doesn't mean it's fertilized. All eggs have a single white dot. When the egg is fertilized, the white dot becomes a bulls eye sort of shape with concentric circles instead of a spot. In the photo below, the left egg is fertilized while the right egg is not.I opened up a bunch of eggs today to check for any development, but none had any. I do believe they were fertile? All of them had a spot on the yolk (like on the left on the picture below), some slightly different shapes though.
I suspect my coop may have been colder at night than I thought it was, so they may have already been "dead" before I even put them in the incubator.
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I have 9 eggs left in the incubator, although at this point, I doubt any of them have chicks growing inside. (The 5 eggs a friend gave me are among them)
I'm going to look into getting a new hygrometer, as I suspect the one built into the incubator is inaccurate.
I used a human in-ear thermometer (it's what I had on hand) a couple times to measure inside the machine. At least the temperature seems accurate and has been steady.
When you do this again, make sure you have a proper thermometer and hygrometer that are calibrated. Not sure what an in-ear thermometer is - the kind where you have to touch it to skin to read the temperature? If yes, that's not a good idea for eggs. The moment you open the incubator, the temperature drops sharply and the surface of the eggs starts cooling down. You can't get a good read by opening the incubator to touch a thermometer to the eggs (if that's what you were doing). The thermometer needs to sit inside the incubator to get an accurate read, and it needs to be placed at the top of the egg, not just anywhere in the incubator. Depending on where the heating element is, and whether the incubator has a fan or not, temperature inside the incubator can vary dramatically from one spot to another, including vertically, so it's very important to measure the temperature accurately. Get a reptile thermometer that has the probe on a long cord. Put the probe inside, at the top of the egg. You can then have the display outside the incubator for easier reading. And calibrate in ice water before using. Salt test the hygrometer (look it up). And then once you have the proper tools, try another hatch. It seems to me like the tools weren't quite right, and the temperature and/or humidity may have been way off from what you thought they were. Eggs sitting in the coop for a few days uncollected won't just die, they lie dormant until you start incubating them. I think this was an issue of not measuring the correct temperature and either cooking the eggs, or not heating them enough for development to begin (a couple of degrees can make a big difference - embryos die at 104). Don't give up, and good luck on your next hatch!
