humidity issue, are the eggs outgassing humidity?

[bel]

I have a weird issue with the king suro 20 this run, The humidity wants to be at 50% no matter what. The vent is open and no water has gone in the unit, the pump never kicked in to add any.
The reading drops when opened, but increases again when closed. The only thing I can figure is eggs outgassing humidity, maybe the bad ones?
I pulled out a weeper, and today a stinker.

Any ideas how to get it to drop?
Thanks,
bel

 

[emunk80]

candle all your eggs check for development and you must have missed atleast one or two more bad ones because the gases one or two bad eggs will produce after only a couple days can mess with humidity

 

[bel]

thanks, will give it a try, not sure how well I will be able to see development this early but maybe I will see blood rings on the bad ones.
Sniff test again too.

 

[FenDruadin]

What day are you on in incubation? How can you have weepers & stinkers but not be able to see anything when candling? Not doubting you, just trying to figure it out--an egg has to be bad for a while before it starts to weep or stink, and I can usually tell developing eggs from undeveloping by Day 4. Did you put old eggs in the incubator?

Where is your incubator located? Can you run an air conditioner in the house? As the ambient humidity goes up, so does the humidity inside the incubator. Running the AC can lower that ambient humidity.

If you can't get the humidity lower, you can compensate somewhat by misting the eggs with lukewarm water daily. It's counter-intuitive, but misting with water actually has the same effect as lowering the humidity--something about the polarity of water causes the water on the shell to attract the water inside the shell and increases the amount of evaporation from inside the egg, which helps the air cell to develop, which is the point of having lower humidity.

Good luck!

 

[Kedreeva]

As far as I know 50% is within acceptable humidity... so unless you're worried about actually having bad eggs (which you can continue to check for, here's a good link: http://shilala.homestead.com/candling.html) I don't think it's too much of a problem. But maybe that is just me >.>

 

[bel]

Quote:
They were put in on the evening of the 17th. Its set up on the dining room table. Haven't candled yet, I don't have a great candler so usually I don't toss clears early unless its a weeper or a stinker. This is the first time I had a stinker or weeper this early though. They are shipped eggs, and so far both the stinker and weeper are from the same person who shipped them fedex. I am starting to think this group had a temperature issue in shipping.

We have an AC, but its just a small window mount, not very effective to drop humidity. Without it the ambient room humidity is lower than in the incubator, which is odd with the heated forced air it should be lower in the incubator. When the lid is off the reading drops to 40%.
Thanks for the tip on misting, if the airsacs are too small I will give it a try.

 

[bel]

Well this sucks, I candled its the fedex lot (longcrowers being incubated for my dad.) They are too pourous and a couple had airsacs closer to a day 17 egg so most likely they are the culprit in the humidity issue. I pulled the most pourous definate clears, also one early blood ring, hopefully we can still get a bird or 2 out of this but its not looking promising.

The other group has airsacs that look about right, if not just a hair small but not enough to be an issue yet.

 

[adrian]

Sounds like you got old, if not already bad, eggs, that either rotted rather quickly or were already rotten, and have been contributing to a higher humidity. They may also spread bacteria. I suggest you candle in a very dark room and invest in an LED flashlight. Research candling. I can actually tell fertile from infertile eggs on 24hrs of incubation; anyone with a good flashlight and a trained eye can do this, and detect deaths very soon after they occur to reduce any issues rotten eggs may cause within the incubator.

 

[FenDruadin]

Aw. I'm sorry about your fedex eggs. I've never tried to hatch shipped eggs, so that possibility hadn't occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense. I suspect they were already bad when you got them, so it also makes sense that they would rot early.

I candle with a flashlight in a dark room. Some day I'll get a candler, maybe, but the flashlight is fine for my purposes so I haven't needed to yet. With pale-shelled chicken eggs I can tell as early as 24 hours, too, with some degree of accuracy (maybe 80%), even with just a flashlight. My ducks lay thick-shelled green eggs, and are harder to candle, but I can still tell on some of them by Day 3 and 98% on Day 4. I still leave them till Day 10 to be sure, but they are so fresh to start with that they are never weeping or smelly by that time, even if they started and then stopped developing.

Glad to hear your air cells on the others are developing nicely.

I wish I had known about bad eggs offgassing before my last hatch. I had a very poor hatch recently due to small air cells and we couldn't figure out why, because there had been no water in the wells and although it was hot the humidity in the house had not been that high either (I had stopped measuring inside the incubator because I had been having so much success I thought I didn't need it--silly me--learned my lesson, anyway).

Having read this thread, I now believe the small air cells in the duck eggs were due to some bad quail eggs that were in with them. We had put in sixty quail eggs, many of which we knew were old. But we figured we had nothing to lose by putting them in. One exploded after a few days (luckily quail eggs are so small their explosions don't count for much) and about a third of them never developed. Quail eggs are VERY hard to candle, so we just left them all for fear of throwing away a good one. Now I believe the old quail eggs may have been raising the humidity in the bator and caused the poor hatch of my duck eggs.

 

[bel]

Thanks, I do use LED flashlights, maybe I just don't trust my checking either early on when its harder to tell. Never ran into this outgassing issue before, usually watching for weepers, and stinkers then candling after a week has done well.

Today the humidity dropped to 45%. Looks like I will be pulling more tonight it should drop to 40%. Its a real shame about this lot my dad was really looking forward to them, I need to find a different breeder.

The Pyncheons are looking good though, love buying from HinkJC, never had issues with eggs from her.