HELP! Loosing humidity in Hoba-vator (first time hatching)

[acbunker]

I'll try to plug one hole tomorrow, since I'll (finally) be home all day.

I'll be working on my new project: a homemade hatchery. I've already bought a few things for it following several advices from people in this forum. The goal is to separate my Ameraucanas & Copper Marans from the mutts. I'll have plenty of time to make sure it works before the time comes! And if it doesn't, I guess I'll just have to keep an eye on my eggs when (and if) they hatch. Good thing it is supposed to happen on the 17th, and the 18th is a holiday! WOOHOO!

On mine, reservoir # 1 goes around the plastic tray, and reservoir #2 goes to the center of the tray. I'll make sure to make notes on the air cell - I haven't read the entire article word by word, but I do recall reading somewhere that you can mark with a pencil where the air cell is, so you can track the progress. I will be reading the article as I go along, this way I won't need to worry about remembering what to do.

So this is the progress so far: temperature still stable on 100 F on the mercury thermometer and oscillating between 99.1 and 99.5 on the digital thermometer. Humidity is still stable at 28%.

Things seems to be doing well, but I'll keep you posted. Thank you for all your advices!!!!

Quick question: do you have any eggs in your incubator now? If yes, when did you out them in it and what are they?

Night Night!

 

[Rockashelle]

Good morning!

Lol! Mine are going in first thing in the morning (Sunday). I have 42 eggs going in however, not sure about the fertility of one of my roosters as he is still under a year old & of course winter weather. So... It could be just half of what I put in is even fertile. Fingers crossed. I raise Dorking heritage chickens. They are both meat & egg birds. I do have one little Ameraucana who thinks she a Dorking. She lays fabulously huge eggs so I have decided to hatch 8 of her eggs for for layers. Plus, she has an incredible personality which is why I keep her around in the first place. ;D

I built my own hatcher as well. I was so nervous to use it the first time but it actually holds temperature better than my hovabator. It has been very useful. I want to build another one.

Keep me posted. Sounds great so far!

 

[acbunker]

Oooow.. dorkings... I have a soft spot in my heart for dorkings: we had a one for a few months when we bought our pullets and cockerels from a breeder. We bought 4 young birds on the 3rd week of April/2012 (ended up being 2 pullets and 2 cockerels), then we bought 6 more birds 3 weeks later (1 pullet and 5 cockerels), and one of the boys was a dorking.

He was kinda special from the beginning, we nursed him as much as we could, he was a sweet heart. In human world, he would be the one wearing a helmet 24/7!! We named him turkey lips because for a little while, we thought he was a turkey chick, and not a chicken chick. He wings were hanging lower than the others, he totally looked like a turkey, but the breeder said he was a dorking. He was club-footed and would always miss food if it was only one grain, or one something. He could never hit the right spot where the food was... Good thing we always had the feeder so he wouldn't miss food.

With him I learned that chickens can purr if they are happy - he did that for a long time. One morning, in August, everybody got out of the coop, but not him. I picked him up to bring him inside, I knew right away something was wrong and his time was up. One hour later he was gone.... As expected, he didn't make it...

Anyway, I hope you eggs are fertile. I wrote down my list of eggs in a different thread, but I'm copying and pasting here:
13 purebred Ameraucanas
06 purebred French Black Copper Marans
02 Rhode Island Red x Ameraucana (roo)
12 New Hampshire x Barred Rock (roo)
02 Light/Buff Sussex cross x Delaware (roo)
05 Barred Rock x Delaware (roo)

The last two ones are from my flock. And actually I bought the copper maran flock when I bought my eggs from a breeder - she was switching breeds (from Copper Marans to Chocolate Orpington large fowl). So I got her 3 hens and one roo. I re-homed my Delaware roo last weekend and now someone is interested in our Gold Laced Wyandotte. We are keeping the cooper maran as our only roo, so we can have purebred copper maran babies, ameraucana copper maran cross hens, and other mutts as well. We have (not counting the Wyandotte roo) is 1 light/buffed Sussex cross hen, 1 blue laced Wyandotte hen, 1 barred rock hen, 3 copper marans and 1 copper maran roo. The ameraucanas will come from the eggs we hatch - and if they don't hatch, I'll buy a couple of pullets somewhere else.

My incubator decided to drastically drop humidity today: started at 26% this morning, then 24%, 23%, 21% (when I freaked out and added some water this evening).

I bought more things for my hatcher, but ended up being dog day: groom and bath for my dogs plus the new foster we got yesterday.

Tomorrow I'll candle the eggs and build my hatcher.

How did you build yours? Do you have pictures? Or can you describe it? I bought a Styrofoam cooler, lamp socket, dimmer, a metal screen, already had some Plexiglas, and I took a computer fan out of my old computer.

I hope that's enough...

 

[acbunker]

Candled my eggs today. Exciting process: "it's fertile, yesss!!!"

"it's not fertile, noooo!!!"

Anyway, the end result is 14 non-fertile and 26 fertile. All my Ameraucanas were fertile, which makes me very happy!!! All copper marans weren't, which is ok since I have the hens and the roo.

Now the whole air cell thing is a lot harder that what I thought!!! In the end the hubby and I realized that we had no idea what we were doing and decided to check for fertility and period.

Didn't build anything, spent a lot of time snuggling on the couch with the hubby! He did help me to find some good hatchers we can build. We work on it later this week.

Humidity is now 42%, since I added some more water to it. The tray was pretty much dry when I opened it, which surprised me, since I added more water yesterday.

Too late. Going to bed now

Night Night!

 

[Rockashelle]

Sent you a PM