is 78% humidity to high for Lock down

[cmom]

I have been incubating around 35% humidity and at lockdown raising my humidity to around 75%. I used to incubate with the humidity around 50% and then bumping it up to 65% to 70% but since I have been doing the 35%/75%, I have had 100% hatches and always around 95%. I was surprised myself how much my hatches increased.

 

[Phantom_Rooster]

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Now that sounds like good advice. Thanks cmom. I'm on Day 11 with some expensive shipped eggs. My humidity has been 40% to 45%, but mostly around 40% average. This is the best that I can get with high relative humidity and dry incubating. So, where do you suggest that I be at lockdown? I am asking this for my own good and to help Spitman know where he should be also.

 

[cmom]

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Now that sounds like good advice. Thanks cmom. I'm on Day 11 with some expensive shipped eggs. My humidity has been 40% to 45%, but mostly around 40% average. This is the best that I can get with high relative humidity and dry incubating. So, where do you suggest that I be at lockdown? I am asking this for my own good and to help Spitman know where he should be also.

At lockdown I keep my humidity around 75%. I have had no shrink wrapping even though I take the chicks and their shells out of the incubator more or less as they hatch. The chicks just pop out of their shells. I had more problems with shrink wrapping before but not any more at 35%/75%. My last hatch was closer to 40% even with all of my vents open but I still had a 95% hatch.

 

[Gypsy07]

I incubate at 45% (the figure I have found will reliably get my eggs to a 13% weight loss as required) and I go up to 75% for lockdown. If the humidity goes higher, I don't worry. I've run more than one lockdown at 80-85% the whole way through to hatch, and in another I've had the humidity sitting up above 90% for well over a day. I've never had a chick drown yet.

The problem with humidity is that a lot of people don't actually understand how it works in relation to development and hatching. If you over-humidify your eggs from days 1-18, your chicks will in all likelihood still be alive by day 18. They're still enclosed in the membrane and not breathing air, so they physically cannot drown. Once they've been in lockdown for a couple of days, they pip internally into the air cell. This is when they first breathe air, and if your eggs haven't lost enough moisture, this is when they will drown.

So, people see chicks alive on entering lockdown, and dying during lockdown. Then they find excess fluid inside the eggs. So they blame the high lockdown humidity for the chicks' deaths, where in actual fact the real culprit is an over-high humidity the first 18 days of incubation.

Humidity is hard to get right and hard to advise on, as some people succeed with 30% and some people succeed with 50%. There isn't really a one-figure-fits-all answer as to what's the correct incubation humidity. MOST people would do well to start with 35% to 45% and fine tune it from there. But not everyone. I weigh my eggs to determine correct moisture loss and find that some eggs (usually ones from other people's birds) require higher/lower humidity than the 45% that my own eggs do well with. The benefit of weighing eggs is that you can adjust humidity as your incubation progresses and be fairly confident of getting to lockdown EVERY TIME with eggs that have lost the correct amount of moisture.

Hope that helps a bit...

 

[Freckle Face Farm]

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X2 Mine runs 95% at lockdown.. Works great for me..

 

[cmom]

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X2 Mine runs 95% at lockdown.. Works great for me..

Hi Dawn, Hope you are feeling better. I got bit by a bug too. How is your silkie chick? It surprised me when it hatched as I was expecting a BO.

 

[Jake Levi]

The thing to keep in mind is what the ambient temperature and humidity is, you want the egg to drop moisture/weight in the first 18 days, if your ambient humidity is too high then the chick can drown if the humidity hasnt been let out of the egg in the first 18 days, I prefer 25-45% incubator humidity if the ambient is higher. At lockdown 65-75 % humidity.

Generally it takes a couple hatches to find what works best in balancing the humiditys. Good luck !

 

[kathyinmo]

I incubate at around 35% humidity, and I hatch at around 60-65%. I have run it higher, but ended up drowning many chicks.

 

[cmom]

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X2

 

[craz e laid e]

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What kind of scale do you use to weigh the eggs?