help please help. I'm at day 20 and the electricity is out for almost an hour. I did put a blanket o

[Cheecky B]

How long are they able to survive? Will they hatch or shrink wrap??

 

[HEChicken]

I've had them survive power outages of 4-6 hours no problems, and I've heard of people having longer outages without issue. The main thing is to NOT open the incubator and let out any of the heat that is in there. You can even wrap a blanket around it to help keep heat in if you don't know when the power will come back on.

 

[Ridgerunner]

At day 20 that’s not as bad as it could be. Hopefully the power will come back on soon. If you have hot water, you might put some of that in there in a Ziploc bag or some closed container, but be careful not to get the incubator too warm. Too hot is much more dangerous for you than too cool. Those eggs can handle some cool, but too hot can cook them.

It’s not unusual for the hen to leave the nest for an hour or more to eat, drink, poop, and take a dust bath. Some of my broody hens chill with the flock some when they are taking their daily constitutional if the weather is warm. So a lack of a heat source for a while is not a big deal. Your incubator should be pretty well insulated, so it should be fairly slow to cool off.

At that age, the chicks are generating a lot of heat by themselves. You don’t have this situation, but in the commercial hatcheries where they incubate maybe 60,000 eggs in one incubator, the problem late in the process is more of getting rid of excess heat so they don’t cook themselves instead of having to supply heat. You don’t have 60,000 eggs so you don’t have that problem, but yours are still generating some heat.

Last summer I had a broody hen go back to the wrong nest about two weeks into her incubation. By the time I found her the eggs were quite cold to the touch. I just put her back in the right eggs. She not only hatched 11 out of 11, but they were a full day early.

As long as this does not go on too long, it should not prove fatal. Exactly how long they can go I don’t know, but a few hours should not hurt them. Good luck in getting the power back on.

Heat has nothing to do with shrink-wrap. Humidity is the issue with that.

 

[Strader]

I wouldn't open the incubator and I would run down to home depot and rent small 110 volt gas powered generator, could be 1 hour could be 10 hours.

 

[Cheecky B]

Incubators back on. Its been around 2 hrs now. Struggling to stabilize temperature. Thanks for replies