GQF 1502 Staggered hatches??

[mill-j]

Ideally you space them to where the 4th batch gets set after the 1st hatches. But realistically, if you have a setup that works, there's no need to change. A friend of mine has a 1502 and a matching cabinet hatcher as well, it's much easier to manage.

 

[Fairview01]

So having 22 hatch out of 30 eggs set represents nearly a 70% hatch rate. There will be hatches better than that and those that will be worse. 70% success is a good number.

I stagger batches in my GQF 1502 all the time. Chickens don't have as many problems with this as turkeys. I've only hatched several guineas but they seemed to hatch fine.

The trick is getting your batches on a schedule, and it works best if your hatching all chickens or all turkeys, etc. For example: if you put a batch of chicken eggs in a week apart, the other batches will experience only about 3 days of high humidity and if you can effectively drop the humidity after a batch hatches, it should be fine.

This year I've been staggering a lot of small batches of turkey, chicken, bantam, and my hatch rates drop the closer the batches are set because there is not enough time between hatches to drop the humidity.

X2

Putting an incubator into double duty is all about scheduling. Chickens are easiest of all. I have a 4 drawer Leahy incubator. When I'm hatching I set eggs every seven days. On day 19 I set for hatching, close the vents and max out humidity. On day 21 I set the new eggs. After hatch is complete I remove water and open all vents for 3 days to dry things out.

As long as a schedule can be devised where one tray of eggs move to hatching and another tray of eggs begin incubation at the same time making an incubator do double duty is very easy to do with good success.