How to position eggs for lockdown

[Chickspa]

Hi all!

I'm on day 18 of my second hatch (first one was 2020) and conflicted about how to position the eggs when I put them in lockdown this afternoon. I remember the chaos of the first hatch, with eggs being rolled all over the place and thought this time I'd place the eggs in a cut-down styrofoam egg carton to keep them upright and away from soccer playing hatchlings after seeing some people do that online.

Now I'm getting nervous about trying something new like this. I only have 6 eggs in the incubator. Should I just keep them on their sides? I don't want to do something different and have it totally fail because of something I don't know about - like maybe the styrofoam will limit the air somehow, or maybe the chicks need to rock and roll around to hatch.

Thoughts? With only 6 eggs, I really want to make sure I give them the best chance to hatch. It's a mix of Ameraucana mixes and rhode island red mixes. (I started with more, but candled at days 10 and 14, and had LOTS of unfertilized eggs and eggs that just never started up - kids later told me that the reds can't stand the rooster, and won't let him mate with them, so it's now mostly Ameraucana eggs).

Thanks for any input you can give!

 

[Yardmom]

Not familiar with standing them up. Are you trying it. Good luck. I know some put ropes between the eggs. I personally let my chicks play the egg rolling game. Never had an issue because of it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I'm not convinced it makes any real difference. I've only hatched by laying them down and letting the first to hatch play rugby with the late hatchers. I don't think them being rolled around is going to have any effect on what is going on inside the egg. The chick is kind of locked in position in there. I once had an egg get cupped in a half shell of an already hatched egg which could have inhibited pip or zip so I opened the incubator to separate them so things can happen. I imagine things could happen if you stand them up but I don't have the experience to know what that might be.

From what I've read the commercial operations lay the eggs flat, but that's for their own unique reason. They may be hatching 60,000 eggs in one hatcher. That many embryos together generate a lot of heat, so much that they have to cool the eggs and remove the heat to keep from cooking them. It's easier to blow air on them and cool them if they are laying flat. We don't have that problem, we are not hatching that many eggs together. With them any problems they experience with laying the eggs flat are outweighed by the overheating issue. For us, it is not apples to apples to compare to them.

To me laying them flat is the simplest method and the older I get the more I like simple. If it is good enough for a broody hen and the commercial operations it is good enough for me. Not that I'm going to criticize anyone for using the other method, I don't know that there is anything wrong with it.