Help!! I think I killed my eggs

[iampogue]

So I am new to hatching out my own eggs. My husband is the resident chicken guru, but he is out of the country right now. I wanted to surprise him and build an incubator and hatch out eggs for his return. I made my incubator out of an old cabinet. With that said, here is the issue.

I candled the eggs at day 1, day 7, and day 16. I see growth and movement. My temp would fluctuate between 99 and 101. So I wasn't worried about that and my humidity would go between 50 to 53. I ran the system for a couple days before I put the eggs in to insure that everything was running smoothly. On the morning of day 18, I did one last rotation and ensured that everything was good to go. I went to bed that night with my temp at 99 and humidity at 60. When I woke up on the morning of day 19, my light bulb went out and my humidity was at 70 and my temp was at 70. I immediately went to the store and bought a new bulb. (lesson learned: always keep extra supplies on hand). Not sure what I did wrong, but the new bulb is holding the temp at 97 - 98 degrees.

Now I am on day 23 and only one egg has cracked and pip. Did I kill my eggs with the drop on day 18? Should I wait a little longer. I am not seeing movement and I am not hearing any sounds. Any help would be welcomed. Thanks in advance.

 

[matlock585]

The drop in temp shouldn't have hurt anything. I had a 7 hour power outage when my eggs were on day 10 and the temp fell to 68 degrees. They are all still fine, no harm done.
What I think may have happened is too high of a humidity percentage. If you incubated at 50% the whole time the eggs wouldn't lose enough moisture and the chicks would drown at internal pip. Maybe you'll still get some out of it though.
If I can offer some advice, I'd say chalk this run up to trial and experience. Read up on dry incubation. That works well for me. I keep the humidity low, like around 20% for the first 18 days, and raise it up to 50% for lock down.
Good luck to you. And congratulations on getting an incubator built. It's not the easiest task to do.

 

[kallnojoy]

Above advice as well as consider running two bulbs at the same time if space allows - if both are working you'll warm up quicker and if one fails you'll still have one remaining.

Even in my tiny cooler I run 2 60 watts bulbs:

 

[iampogue]

Thank you both for you input. I am definitely going to add a second light bulb before I start it up again. I am also going to try running the humidity lower. I did crack open a couple of eggs and going from what I found on the internet, it appeared to be somewhere around day 18 and then other appeared to not have taken at all. Maybe it was just infertile.

I am going to chalk this run up to experience. So now I am finally ready to hatch eggs!

 

[whitneymoon]

Interesting info about dry incubation. I have had mine set at about 40-50% for the 9 days so far. Is this too high?

 

[lazy gardener]

I would drop it a bit. Again, check the thread regarding dry incubation. It seems that folks are having good hatches by running even dryer than the original dry incubation recommendations. I think the important thing is to increase it to 65% when you go into lock down.