Home made incubator findings...

[Everlong]

Well, first incubation was a failure. sort of. I opened it few times and apparently my chicks got shrink wrapped. one survived-I helped it out, died 3 days later.... I had 7 eggs in.

2nd time I put 7 eggs in, and got 5 out. all healthy-all survived. Got random eggs out of 50 in the fridge, and some from a female that was in separation, lol, I totally forgot they need to be fertile!!!!! all alive and well until today. they are 3 weeks old more or less.
Temp was average whatever people recommend and my humidity was 60% ALL THE TIME.

One morning I just woke up and all 5 were there@!!!! I would say I had a great hatch percentage considering that one hen was in isolation and one or two of the eggs could have been not fertile at all.

So guys, my advice....
Don't stress it, put them in, close lid, keep it closed, and add water......

 

[purslanegarden]

Well first few times, you do need to verify that your settings are right, especially with a home-made incubator, so there will probably be a lot of opening to check temperatures and humidity. After that, yes, just pop them in, lock it up around 15-16 days later, and then watch the babies hatching.

But even with that, it's not so different from a hen getting up off the nest for a bit. So I think that is where candling comes in handy to verify if your percentage of non-hatch is related to some conditions of your incubator or the egg being infertile. I don't candle so what I end up doing is to crack the eggs after 21-22 days (giving them a little more just in case some egg is late) to see if there has been some embryo development.

Most of the time, what I see is infertile eggs that never developed, or an egg that started but never went beyond too much. I've never found a fully-formed or almost fully-formed chick that died late in the development stage. (Not the same as finding chicks which were peeping but could not get out of their eggs, which means I know that egg was viable, just that the chick may have had trouble getting out)