Hatch with me! Placed in bator on 5-13-2010. First hatch!

[ferventkids]

Good luck VillageChicken.

 

[AshleyFishy]

 

[chickee]

KEEPING MY FINGERS CROSSED

FOR A GREAT HATCH FOR VillageChicken!

 

[AshleyFishy]

 

[Peep Talk]

Good luck villagechicken!

Here's a bunny dance for many pips, zips and fuzzies!

 

[6littlechickies]

We candled tonight and looks like we have 16 good eggs left!

Considering I was only expecting 12 eggs to begin with, I'm pretty happy. Looks like we had a few more quitters since the last candle but gosh, the shells are really hard to see into. There were a couple I almost thought were bad...until I saw them move!!

I have the hatcher all setup and will be moving them over tomorrow. Can't wait to see what hatches!

Good luck to all! Happy hatching!

 

[Tbird84]

Guess I'm a little late to the party, but I'll join anyway. I put in 36 the evening of the 13th. Half RIR and half Barred Rocks. So far, I have only seen one blood ring. Kinda sketchy on a few of the others. They are so dark, it's hard to tell! Two clear ones I think. I'm excited. Haven't had chickens since I was a kid. Looking forward to it!

 

[morninggloryhatchery]

Quote:

Good Luck on your hatch!!!!!!

 

[VillageChicken]

Thanks for all the kind encouragement and thumbs ups.

Of course if anything can go wrong, it usually does. About 5 minutes after my post about lockdown, my circulation fan just quit.

My eggs had only been in lockdown for 10 minutes, and humidity hadn't even gone up much, so I opened up and tried to revive the fan to no avail. This was close to midnight.

My poor wife had gone to bed already, and I was tiptoeing around the room (yes the 'bator is in the bedroom for lockdown) trying to McGyver some sort of device to stir up the air inside the incubator through one of the ventilation holes. The floor around the incubator looked like a miniature scene from Junkyard Wars.

I rigged something to the shaft of an old fan that I had pulled apart (literally, with a loud crash and many apologies to my wife) that was spinning around stirring up the air through one of the ventilation holes. I finally went to sleep at 2am, only to wake up 30 minutes later because the fan had gotten a little loud, and though it was working, sounded like it was on the verge of self destruct.

So at that point, I realized that I might be better off just leaving well enough alone, and accepting the fact that I now had a still air incubator. I might get by with some small adjustments to temperature for the next 3 days, rather than having fan parts flying around the room in the wee hours of the morning.

So gang, I've got the temp at 100.5 measured at about the middle of the eggs, because I didn't want to open up to put the thermometer at the top of the eggs. Convection appears to be providing enough circulation, drawing air through holes on one end near the bottom and out through holes near the top on the opposite end. I can feel warm air drafting out. Humidity is between 65 and 70%. Fortunately the eggs were placed fairly far away from the heat source, so the temp difference should not be too large between different eggs in the batch.

Have I missed anything? Is the temp too high? I go back and forth between thinking that hatching eggs are amazingly resilient and incredibly fragile. At this point I'm trying to think resilient. My gut tells me they're okay. Maybe that's just the optimism of inexperience.

Just when I thought I could relax and wait for pips, this new setup has me wondering if there's anything else I should do.

Maybe I should ask for that R-Com 20 for my birthday after all.

 

[chickee]

Sounds like your temps and humidity are fine

I'm transfering my eggs to a still air incubator for lockdown/hatching tomorrow, and I have the temp set at 100 degrees and the humidity at 65%. If your temps run a little low, your chicks will just take a little longer before they hatch. GOOD LUCK!

I'm eggsited for you!

I'll be waiting . . .