First, go to the Learning Center at the top of this page and start reading. There is a lot of good information up there.
Is your incubator a forced air or still (thermal) air? If it has a fan the air should be mixed enough that the temperature is the same throughout. If it does not have a fan the temperature inside will vary depending on elevation because warm air rises. That is an important consideration in where you put thermometers and even the readings. In general you want a reading around 99.5 F for a forced air taken about anywhere or a reading of 101.5 F taken at the top of the eggs in a still air.
I don’t have any specific recommendation for which thermometer to buy, online may be better than Walmart. Whether your incubator is a forced air or still air could influence your selection too. What you want in a thermometer is one that reads to the tenth of a degree. You don’t have to hit the 99.5 or 101.5 exactly, but you want to be reasonably close.
Never trust any thermometer that has not been calibrated, especially the one that comes with the incubator. The next time you are at Walmart, look at the thermometers that you typically hang outside to check the temperature. They are all on the same shelf in a climate controlled room, you’d think they all read the same. I’ve seen as much as 9 degrees difference from the highest to the lowest readings. I’ll include some links on how to calibrate your thermometer and hygrometer. I’m more comfortable with the medical thermometer method myself since you are working in that range.
Calibrate a Thermometer
http://www.allfoodbusiness.com/calibrating_thermometers.php
Rebel’s Thermometer Calibration
http://cmfarm.us/ThermometerCalibration.html
Rebel’s Hygrometer Calibration
http://cmfarm.us/HygrometerCalibration.html
The first time you use it you probably don’t even need to clean it. If you do, soap and water should be fine. After I use mine I wash the insides well with dishwashing soap and water, then bleach it with a weak bleach solution. It’s very important after you use it to sanitize it. You do not want any bacteria in there.
It’s generally recommended to not try to hatch especially valuable eggs the first time. There is some trial and error involved. Not all incubators are the same. Even the professionals that might have 120,000 eggs in one incubator have to tweak the settings if they move an incubator across the room. That’s intended to stop people from getting very special expensive eggs from a breeder for the first incubation. I’ll warn you though, any eggs you put in there will become pretty precious to you. That just happens once you start incubating eggs.
I’ll mention this now. What are you going to do with the chicks you hatch? A lot of them will be male. It’s a lot of fun to hatch eggs, it really is. But you need a plan for all those chicks before you set eggs.
The last thing a hen does just before she lays an egg is to coat it with a fast-drying liquid called “bloom” or “cuticle”. This is a layer that works really well to keep bacteria out of the developing egg. If you wash the eggs or sandpaper them to clean them, you remove this protective coating. You do not want to wash them to remove this protective coating. You also do not want to set “dirty” eggs. A light smudge of mud or poop isn’t horrible, but the dirtier they are the more likely that bloom has been compromised and you will have serious problems. Only set unwashed clean eggs.
Are your EE’s laying colored eggs, blue or green? If they are colored there is at least a 50-50 chance any pullets hatched with that rooter will lay colored eggs. If they are not laying colored eggs, there is absolutely no chance the pullets will lay colored eggs. I’ll avoid the long genetics explanation.
I’ll give you one last group of links. In my opinion the A&M article goes way overboard in many things but it still gives you the basics. It shoots for the ideal. Some things are important to get right, like pointy side down during storage and incubating. But one of the recommendations is to store them at 55 degrees F. I don’t have any place that temperature, the best I can do is room temperature so that is what I do. I also do not individually wrap eggs for storage to reduce moisture loss. I store mine in the turner pointy side down at room temperature so they regularly get turned and do not store them more than a week to reduce moisture loss, and I normally still get good hatches. I know it’s hard but if you do the best you reasonably can without obsessing over getting it exactly precise you will probably do really well.
The last two are for after your hatch. If you don’t open the unhatched eggs (if you have any) you really don’t know how to tweak your incubator to get better hatches. As you can see there are a lot of things that can affect the hatch. Even when you open the eggs it’s not always clear exactly what the problem was but at least you have something to go by.
Texas A&M Incubation site
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/...e-Cartwright-Incubating-and-hatching-eggs.pdf
Mississippi State Incubation Troubleshooting
http://extension.msstate.edu/content/trouble-shooting-failures-egg-incubation
Illinois Incubation troubleshooting
http://urbanext.illinois.edu/eggs/res24-00.html
The good thing is that the eggs are really pretty tough. Some hens lay eggs outside in hidden nests in all kinds of weather with some of the eggs laid two weeks or more before incubation begins. Most of those eggs hatch. All this information points you toward the ideal, but you don’t always have to be that precise to still get good hatches. Just do the best you reasonably can.
Good luck!
