Interupted Incubation???

[DylansMom]

Hi everyone,
Just wondering about your experiences with incubator power failures and or a broody hen being chased off or leaving a clutch of eggs for a period of time. This past season I accidentally pulled a fertile developing egg from my incubator and left a clear one in(got them mixed up). These were about halfway to hatch, I discovered my error about 15 hours later. The pulled egg had sat at room temp 70 F, all that time. I candled and saw movement so I put it back in and crossed my fingers. It was 1 of 2 purples that I had shipped to me from about 100 miles away, so I was really bummed. When hatching time arrived 1 purple popped right out, and just as I was starting to worry # 2 popped out almost exactly 15 hours after the first. 2 lovely healthy purple hens that have done great. Anbody else have any experiences, what is the longest you've seen them go and still hatch okay?

 

[sourland]

It all depends upon how chilled the egg gets and for how long. Generally unless the chilling is severe the only impact is a slightly increased incubation period on chilled eggs.

 

[frenchblackcopper]

We had a power outage this past summer for about 6 hours. Once per week I set eggs, and after this outage I kept track of how many hatched. The older 3 groups of eggs had already been candled so all those eggs incubating was known to be viable and growing. We lost almost all eggs from the last group(youngest) eggs. The oldest and second oldest groups seemed to sustain the power loss okay, and the third group we lost about half of them. It all comes down to how far developed the embryo is. A close to fully developed chick does produce heat compared to an embryo that maybe only a few days old. Plus with eggs being close together I think they radiate heat, or kinda like a group warmth factor sustains them a lot longer.

 

[AugeredIn]

The older they are the better they tolerate it. Did not have any incubator outages of any length last year but previous year had several ranging from 15 minutes to 8-10 hours. Generally anything less than a week old was dead if left for more than about 4-5 hours. The older eggs did fairly well even during the longest outages. The eggs did not get left out though. They were in the incubator which maintained some residual heat during the outage and the chilling would have been very gradual.

I don't want to try it again so we changed our incubation location last year.

 

[frenchblackcopper]

We've located a nice 4500 watt generator that needs to come here, but then again you must be home to know when your powers out to start the generator. Manytimes power is lost in the country here because of fixing line or installing new power poles while at the same time in town no service is lost.