First time 18th Day - Lock Down!!!

[Jayson_Black]

We are amazed that our 4 eggs are still going at Day 18. the main veins all look strong (artery's?). However, some of the very small (maybe older) vessels are starting to look a little funny. While there is some movement it is not very much. But I have observed movement in all four eggs.

Air Cells are pretty good I think. Taking up a little under 1/5th I think.

Even though we incubated them in a homemade Bator (Sony PlayStation box, Reptile heat mat and a cheap thermostat) we have now locked them down in our newly purchased Janoel 12 (Prolly a Chinese copy as it was really cheap). The Janoel 12 appears to be working.

One scary thing happened though. It is currently the Australian Summer (we're in Australia) and we have had two days of 43c. We initially had the bator in the kitchen, but I had to move it.

It would seem that if the ambient temperature gets above 34-36 degrees c then the heat from the Bator's transformer, LED Display, fan and also latent heat from the element is enough to send the bator over temperature. In our case, we were spiking to 39.1 and again later to 38.8.

So we moved the bator on Day 17 to the bedroom where it is airconditioned. We have set the air conditioning thermostat to 27 degrees.

I understand the risks of Incubating under Refrigerat9ve air-conditioning. But really no choice, the bator kept sp[iking.

The Hygrometer I have says RH% is 86 %, but I don't trust it. I think it is more like around 65% give or take 10%. I have many thermometers and Hygrometers arriving from eBay. I have ordered like 12 of them. $30 worth. Ranging from $1 to $8 lol

I'll take the average of the closest group.

Well, any advice or tips you guys wanna give us would be most welcome. Wish our little Guys and girls luck, it's all up to them now

 

[The Golden Egg5]

I don’t have much to say, but I wanted to wish you luck in your hatch! I can’t wait to see pictures!

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Perhaps you could move it back to the kitchen in the evening and back to the bedroom if forecast is for 40+.
37.8 is ideal. Up to 40.5, there is hatching potential. The last couple days, there's evidence embryos about to hatch can take short term temps up to 43C.

I don't trust hygrometers either without calibration. In fact I now weigh eggs to determine weight loss. This technique is too late for you but in the future, an egg should lose an average of about 0.65% of weight per day. 11-13% during the first 18 days of incubation.
I had a couple hygrometers that I would calibrate and after a day or two they were wrong again. That is worse than flying blind. They went right into the trash.
Without a reliable hygrometer, just fill all the reservoirs with water from now till they hatch. If condensation coats the windows, it is too high.

I've been through what you're doing with the thermometers. It didn't go well for me. I thought I could average them out but if they vary by 3C and one is 5C off, do you count that one in your average?
I even had one from an incubator company that was accurate at 75F but off by 4F at incubation temperature.
My advice is to not trust any of those $1 plus thermometers. Most are supposed to be accurate to ± 2ºF but are usually farther off than that. If they were that accurate, it still isn't accurate enough for incubation.

The two best, yet reasonably priced thermometers I've found are the Brinsea Spot Check, accurate to within ± .1ºC.
http://www.brinsea.com/c-56-incubator-thermometers.aspx
And the Thermoworks RT301WA accurate to within ± 0.5ºC with adjustable calibration.
http://www.thermoworks.com/RT301WA

When all is said and done, will you be glad you spent $30 for 12 you can't trust or $20 for one you can trust?

Another thing to keep in mind is the response time of the thermometer and the effect of the thermostat cycling. Most thermostats operate in a on/off state rather than proportional where power to the heat element is steady and gradual.
If your thermometer is instant read, it will see rather dramatic changes in temperature but the internal egg temperature will be stable.
The LED display contribution to heat will be negligible and lower than incubation temperature.

 

[UThobbyfarmer]

How exciting for you. Good luck. Can't wait to see what hatches.

 

[Jayson_Black]

Thanks for your reply guys. Chicken Canoe, Thank you for that excellent post. very informative. I'm pretty satisfied now I have an accurate read on the ambient temp in the incubator now. Humidity is still something I will have to work on. I think I have managed to get it right thus far with luck. In the future, I don't want to rely on luck. I think I may invest in one of those purpose builtHygrometer/Humidity control/Pump Systems and add it to my existing incubator. We will never have the need for anything bigger than our Janoel 12, but we are almost certainly going to want/need to upgrade its parts and add some parts on to it like the humidity control system. Now that we have the Janoel 12 we can throw out the PlayStation box and forget about using the reptile heat mat as an incubator heating element. However, I wonder if it could be useful in a brooder?!?!?!

The Built-in thermostat of our Janoel 12 seems to work pretty well. It is much better than the el cheapo from eBay. although the Janoel 12 we have is, in fact, an El Cheapo from eBay too, at least its thermostat was made to do this kind of thing and is one of those that adds small amounts of heat for maintenance of the temperature. the other one (the one we used with the PlayStation box) would heat to 38.5, switch off to 37.5. on/off style, like you said. It was very unstable combined with the reptile heat mat. So we are very fortunate to have all 4 of our eggs still alive on Day 19.

So now they are in the Janoel 12 Incubator we can see them without opening anything. We saw them move today. The eggs. Not the Embryo. That was pretty cool and we found ourselves wondering if it meant hatching was imminent. As in the next couple of hours, but nope. We are about 4 hours on from when we saw that movement (some of it very strong, as if it were pecking the inside) and no sign of an external pip yet. One movement from one egg was enough to rotate the egg approx 10 degrees. I thought to myself "Good effort for such a little one"

I have taken some video of some of the candling we did. But I won't post that on its own. I will wait till the chicks hatch and make some video of that. Mash it together then upload it to the Tube.

Happy Hatching Everyone!