Help! Incubator problems!

[Weirdness555]

Hi there,

I am away at uni and my mum back home has decided to hatch some chickens in our brinsea mini advance, no problems so far, we're on day 19 (chicks due on Wednesday) and the incubator has gone nuts! It thinks the temp is 42 degrees C, 107F so it's turned off the heater and is trying to cool the eggs down, but it's actually only 25 degrees c, 77F, so mum's pulled them out and put them under our brooder (the brinsea one) which I wouldn't have done so close to hatching but it's done now and I suppose they are at least warm, I've told her to put them on damp cotton wool and mist them a couple of times a day.

Any ideas to help out? It's such a pain I'm not home to fiddle with them myself

We have a good thermometer/humidity monitor that we can put in with them

thanks people

 

[Yorkshire Coop]

First I would make sure you don't have the cool down option this incubator. I'm not sure if the mini advance has this option. If this isn't the case turn the bator off and then back on again. This should reset it back to the original setting with the 'P' flashing on the control panel as if there has been a power cut. Reset it back to 37.5 Celsius and fingers crossed it should work.

 

[Weirdness555]

Apparently the problem is with the temperature sensor and my parents are worried about resetting it and putting the eggs back in because it will think it's day 1 and start turning. I think there must be a manual override but I can't check because I'm not at home.
What's a cool down option?

 

[Yorkshire Coop]

I have the octagon advance and it has the cool down option of being able to set the incubator for a certain amount of time where it turns the heat off in the incubator it is to mimic the mother hen when she gets off the nest everyday to eat etc. You can set it so that it dosnt come on at all if you want.

On the Brinsea website there are all the operating manuals for all their incubators. Also I think there is trouble shooting section.

 

[Weirdness555]

They've phoned brinsea and they're sending us a new incubator but I don't think it will arrive by Wednesday. I don't think there's a cool down option and it wouldn't be on if there was one anyway, if I remember it's only the newer larger incubators which have that, our one isn't that smart haha

According to the brinsea people it's a problem with the temperature sensor, it thinks it's way hotter than it really is to it's trying to cool it down.

Hopefully we'll be lucky and they'll pull through since they're so close to hatching anyway

Do you know the ideal humidity for lockdown?

 

[Yorkshire Coop]

Great that they are sending a new one it is usually good service from brinsea

Ideal lockdown humidity is 65%.

Could they rig up a quick homemade incubator till the new one arrives?

 

[Weirdness555]

They've got the eggs under the brooder in a seed germinator thing to keep the humidity up