Humidity question!

Swissmiss989

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I'm doing a dry hatch. I keep it around 25-30%. I have also been weighing eggs. I am at my 5% loss mark. When weighed and measured its more like 10%. I'm on day 8. Its not suppose to be 10% till next friday. Can I counter this by upping my humidity for a few days? Can a large air sack hurt the babies?
 
Yes you can slow your moisture loss down by increasing your humidity. Its good that you are monitoring the weight to reach your target.

Pete
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Yes, definitely, you can play around with humidity, raising and lowering it as required to get to the correct weight loss. And a too-large air sac definitely can harm the embryos. My one and only experiment with dry incubation, I wasn't weighing my eggs. They lost so much moisture that by lockdown the air cell took up half of the egg and there was basically nothing left of the chicks but dried out dead little husks. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen to yours, and some people have fantastic results with dry incubation, but it doesn't suit everybody.

If you want your eggs to get to the correct weight loss by lockdown, you are going to have to raise your humidity.

You can either raise it right up to something like 60-65%, to stop the eggs losing any more moisture, and keep it there till next Friday. If your eggs don't lose any more weight between now and then, they'll be back on track. Then from next Friday till lockdown, you'd keep humidity slightly higher than your dry incubation figure, maybe something like 35-40%, to get them to lockdown with the correct moisture loss.

Or you could raise your humidity to something in between, say maybe 50%, to get the eggs to lose the rest of the required moisture slowly and gradually by lockdown. You'd hopefully be able to leave that humidity constant till lockdown, and that would get your eggs to the 13% moisture loss.

Of the two options, the second would be preferable, in that it's better for the eggs if the humidity doesn't swing from one extreme to the other. But the first option is probably easiest to get right. With the second option, you're basically just guessing at what humidity to go for...

But as you're weighing, you should be able to get it right either way! Good luck with them...
 
my first time hatching...they r due to hatch oct 24 i didnt use any humidity until 3days ago,i just didnt know i was supposed to.. idk what the humidity is now i just poured some water n there...do u think mabey i killed them by no humidity? this really sucks.hope they hatch
 
mrs b. bates farm :

my first time hatching...they r due to hatch oct 24 i didnt use any humidity until 3days ago,i just didnt know i was supposed to.. idk what the humidity is now i just poured some water n there...do u think mabey i killed them by no humidity? this really sucks.hope they hatch

Chickens are amazing and chicks are tuff I would not give up on them yet.​
 

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