How to drive yourself insane

[Rusty Hills Farm]

I had a really nice setup that worked well. I had been using the LG without a fan or turner plus a nice little thermometer/hygrometer that was a dial, not digital, and I got good hatches with it. ...And then I decided to "improve" it.

I bought a pc fan and installed it. I bought a wiggler. The old thermometer couldn't work with that, so I got a digital setup with the probes and placed the temp probe in the wiggler. Tested everything and it worked fine. Added eggs.

Within a couple of hours my new digital took a fritz. Trying to take it out and put my old unit back....you guessed it! I dropped the dang thing and broke it.

Now a sensible person would have quit then, right? But did I do the sensible thing? Of course not! I grabbed a small hygrometer from the living room and a small thermometer I normally keep in the brooder and got everything back on the numbers. 40% humidity and 100 degrees. It has maintained those numbers for the last 13 days with nary a fluctuation.

So last night the replacement unit for the fritzed unit arrived. I added it this morning. And according to it, the temp is 96 degrees and the humidity is so low it cannot read it!

ARRGGG! so now I either have a bunch of dead stuff in there or everything is right on the money. When I candle, the air space is the right size and so are the embryos...but I don't see any movement. The shells are all very dark, though, and hard to see through. Naturally I had picked all my darkest eggs precisely BECAUSE I am trying to darken the overall egg color my flock produces and now this is kinda shooting me in the foot.

The thing is, our body temperature is 98.2, right? And the wiggler feels quite warm to my hand, so surely it is warmer than 96? And the eggs feel warm to the touch too. Or am I just kidding myself here?

If they ARE alive, the hatch should be on the 22nd.

Rusty

 

[Guitartists]

I hope the new one is WRONG! Maybe the temps just dropped while you were installing the new one. Let everything warm back up to temp... I would be concerned though... if the new one IS off... you could end up heating up the bator too much. Any way for you to check the accuracy of it?

Maybe the eggs you candled were just resting... especially if the temps dropped a bit while you were switching things out....

 

[Attack Chicken]

I'm prayer for your hatch!

 

[Rusty Hills Farm]

The new thermometer is holding steady at 95.5 degrees and the old thermometer is holding steady at 100 degrees.

Took me a bit of head-scratching, but I finally decided that if the old thermometer is wrong, then the hatch is already lost--I'm on day 13-- and switching to the new one isn't going to help anything now. BUT if the old thermometer is right, then I might still have a decent hatch out of this, so I am going to just stick with the old one and wait out the rest of the days. Plus I just realized the old thermometer, which I used in my brooder, is actually the Acurite that came with my LG, so maybe it really is the accurate one!

Ah, the things we torture ourselves with!

Thanks for listening!

Rusty

 

[gabrielle1976]

I use my body temp as a guage with my therms, I uh find the warmest place and see what the therm reads, my digital reads 97.1 - 97.7 this way and thats about right cause an oral body temp is on avrage 98.6 and its aobut a degree cooler when you use like an armpit.
I am not shure that was helpfull at all.
But like you said if the old one is wrong then youwould have already had issues but if its right and you heat the bator up another 3 or 4 degrees you will certainly have issues for the new one

 

[eschwaderer]

I had a digital that would read -5F actual and -20% humidity. I ended up buying like 5 different thermometers and hygrometers to get an idea what ones were correct

. The fancy digital was the worst by far!