- Oct 13, 2014
- 18
- 1
- 24
Hi all,
Am new to posting here but have been lurking about, reading, and learning for a while now. To introduce myself I'd like to talk about my first experience hatching mailed eggs with an incubator I built myself from examples seen here. I got a great deal (maybe too good a deal) on two dozen French Black Copper Maran eggs on ebay. I think I payed twenty bucks including shipping. Here are my results:
If I recall right ten out of the 23 eggs
were not fertile. Either way only five tried to hatch.. Two died before
getting out of the egg after pipping, one my daughter had to help out
and he died three days later, and we were left with two beautiful chicks
out of 23 eggs.
So, now I'm going fishing for opinions about my failure. (Yes, I know hatching mailed eggs is an iffy affair. But less than 10% success is just not acceptable even with that.) First let me show how the eggs were packaged. We lost one egg in the shipment:
A better pic of the one lost:
So, we took the 23 eggs we had left and put them fat side up into cartons to rest for 24 hours in an attempt to let the air bubble return to normal:
Then we put the eggs into the incubator. I built this incubator from a large chest cooler that my garbage man buddy brought me. It had no top on it so I cut one to fit from plywood and then cut a place for a window glass in its center. My daughter and I scrubbed the stew out of it and then sterilized it with bleach. I installed a 60 watt incandescent with thermostat control from bottom unit of a water heater. I then installed a pc fan to circulate air. Lastly I made an egg turning system that could be done from outside the cooler (to leave it locked shut) with a 3/4" pvc electrical conduit. Here is the turning system:
I found a very kewl analog style thermometer/humidity meter @ walmart and installed it so it would register air quality right at top of the eggs:
Here's a look at the front end of the incubator where the lighting controls, fan, and inlet tube for adding water into the sponge pan is at:
Finally, here she is completely locked down with any air leaks covered up with my daughter's mustache duct tape:
Okay, we kept the heat at a constant 100 degrees, The humidity was kept at 50% until day 18 when I covered up most all our air holes which raised humidity to about 70 - 72%. I feel like I did what I was supposed to, but, after more reading here found a couple of threads saying to keep the humidity at like 40% with these darker eggs as they don't lose as much moisture? Any ideas from our resident experts on what I may have done wrong? Or do you guys think it may have just been a bad batch of eggs, or mailing mishandling? I'm about to try this again and would like to find and correct anything I may be doing wrong so I can get a better hatch rate.
Oh, and here are our two little ones:
Thanks for any advice in advance....
Lew
Am new to posting here but have been lurking about, reading, and learning for a while now. To introduce myself I'd like to talk about my first experience hatching mailed eggs with an incubator I built myself from examples seen here. I got a great deal (maybe too good a deal) on two dozen French Black Copper Maran eggs on ebay. I think I payed twenty bucks including shipping. Here are my results:
If I recall right ten out of the 23 eggs
were not fertile. Either way only five tried to hatch.. Two died before
getting out of the egg after pipping, one my daughter had to help out
and he died three days later, and we were left with two beautiful chicks
out of 23 eggs.
So, now I'm going fishing for opinions about my failure. (Yes, I know hatching mailed eggs is an iffy affair. But less than 10% success is just not acceptable even with that.) First let me show how the eggs were packaged. We lost one egg in the shipment:
A better pic of the one lost:
So, we took the 23 eggs we had left and put them fat side up into cartons to rest for 24 hours in an attempt to let the air bubble return to normal:
Then we put the eggs into the incubator. I built this incubator from a large chest cooler that my garbage man buddy brought me. It had no top on it so I cut one to fit from plywood and then cut a place for a window glass in its center. My daughter and I scrubbed the stew out of it and then sterilized it with bleach. I installed a 60 watt incandescent with thermostat control from bottom unit of a water heater. I then installed a pc fan to circulate air. Lastly I made an egg turning system that could be done from outside the cooler (to leave it locked shut) with a 3/4" pvc electrical conduit. Here is the turning system:
I found a very kewl analog style thermometer/humidity meter @ walmart and installed it so it would register air quality right at top of the eggs:
Here's a look at the front end of the incubator where the lighting controls, fan, and inlet tube for adding water into the sponge pan is at:
Finally, here she is completely locked down with any air leaks covered up with my daughter's mustache duct tape:
Okay, we kept the heat at a constant 100 degrees, The humidity was kept at 50% until day 18 when I covered up most all our air holes which raised humidity to about 70 - 72%. I feel like I did what I was supposed to, but, after more reading here found a couple of threads saying to keep the humidity at like 40% with these darker eggs as they don't lose as much moisture? Any ideas from our resident experts on what I may have done wrong? Or do you guys think it may have just been a bad batch of eggs, or mailing mishandling? I'm about to try this again and would like to find and correct anything I may be doing wrong so I can get a better hatch rate.
Oh, and here are our two little ones:
Thanks for any advice in advance....
Lew
and Welcome To BYC! Sorry about the bad hatch. You might also want to post in the Incubating and Hatching Eggs forum for suggestions, especially about your incubator 
