Humidity and lock-down

[Leavingegypt]

Tomorrow we enter lock-down and I'm worried about getting my humidity up. I was struggling to stay above 40% before I plugged one of the vents with some batting. Now it's pretty steady at 42%. I have heard that surface area is more important than the amount of water. I have very little space between the grate and bottom (once I remove the turner) in the LG that I borrowed. What do you think about a wash cloth covering the bottom soaked in 100% water? Don't want to drown them, but that bump to 70-75% has me worried.
First time incubator, can you tell?

 

[Egghead_Jr]

55-60% is a good place to be during lock down. I like to keep below 60% because as they hatch the humidity jumps up.

Are you using the trays in the bottom of the incubator for water? With those you should easily have more humidity than you need or want. What I do is use a small tumbler or double shot glass to regulate the humidity. Course I don't have an auto turner so the cup used sits right on the screen.

Eggs don't need to be turned to day 18, it's done that long as that is the day humidity is typically raised. You can take your eggs out of the turner a day early and experiment with glass size to get the humidity you want.

Make sure you calibrate your hygrometer with a salt test first. They can be way off and if you've never calibrated it the reading may be meaningless excepting your humidity is going up or down but not correct reading.

In case you never calibrated here is the quick and easy how to:

Juice or milk cap filled with salt.

Add drops of water until you get a paste, like wet sand not water slurry.

Put hygrometer and cap in a zip lock bag and place on counter.

Wait at least 4 hours take a reading, wait another hour and see if it changed. If going down then keep the first reading if going up wait another hour. It will stable off and that is the reading you want.

It should read 75% (+/- a fraction of a percent so yeah, 75% exactly). However far off it is from 75 write on a piece of tape and stick it to incubator to remind you to add this amount or subtract it from reading to correct it to true relative humidity.


Good Luck on your first hatch.