Last several bator hatches failed

[al6517]

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I have been candling to check fertility, and have culled the eggs which were not developing. The eggs progress along nicely with development, then...NOTHING!!!

These are refered to as Quiters and there could be many reasons as to why, don't get stuck on just the cleaning issue, because you can clean it well and bam !! one thing down now move onto the next idea without wasting a good hatch on one segment of the problem. here are some other things to look at.

1. As I mentioned proper nutrition for breeders. This can be anything from shell quality to failure of proper enzymes and amino acids to form, to lack of vitamins & minerals And this can also be done along with other prevenitive measures for better hatches. So take a good look at all things and consider them all instead of putting all your egg's in one basket LOL.

 

[Gypsy07]

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personally I never use bleach.. leaves too much of a residue behind.. and yeah.. when you clean an incubator everything inside it needs to be cleaned

i go through several steps when i clean:

1) clean out all the loose gunk
2) wash with a mild dish detergent to get the rest of the gunk and then rinse
3) when it LOOKS clean I wash it again with vinegar and rinse
4) wash again with baking soda mixed with water and rinse
5) wash a final time with hydrogen peroxide and rinse, dry and then let air dry to remove any excess dampness


I know it sounds like a lot to go through.. but I have never had any funky residues left behind and never had a bacterial problem doing it this way

Just thought I'd say that I always use a dilute solution of household bleach to clean out my bators with and I've never had a problem with residue or leftover bleach smells. I always rinse thoroughly, pat dry with kitchen towel, then do a final air dry with my hairdryer. I have also experimented with washing eggs in a fairly strong solution of household bleach and found that I get better hatches with bleached eggs than with eggs just rinsed in warm water or eggs that are spotlessly clean looking but unwashed.

I'm also wondering, what's the difference between sodium hypochlorite (household bleach) and hydrogen peroxide? I mean, I know you generally use one to clean your toilet and the other to lighten your hair, but both are chemical bleaches. Is peroxide less toxic? Safer to use? I mean, I thought the whole point of bleach for sanitising was to use the strongest one possible to kill all germs, and as long as you rinsed very carefully, none of it would be left behind to do harm to any other organisms...

I suppose your hatching problem could be bacterial, or it could be down to bleach not being rinsed well enough. I'd guess the first one is much more likely though. And yeah, I'd agree that you need to clean your turner too. Even though you probably remove it from the incubator altogether before any eggs hatch, it still needs to be cleaned. When I clean my bators, I REALLY clean them. As in, dismantle them so I can get access to every bit that might harbour germs. When I got my secondhand Brinsea, the first thing I did was strip it down completely into a pile of components to sanitise every last nook and cranny of it...

Apart from that, are you hatching your own eggs, or shipped ones? The same breeds as normal, from the same people, or different breeds from different people? If you are hatching shipped eggs, have you considered that you're just experiencing some random bad luck? How far along in the incubation do your embryos get before they die? Are you sure they all die at pretty much the same stage? How many times has this happened? And how many successful hatches did you have before your problems started? All this info might help to pinpoint your problem...

Edited to add: I just realised you said you have two bators, one for turning and one for hatching. I don't suppose when you said you weren't cleaning the turner, you meant that you weren't cleaning out that whole bator and have only been cleaning out the hatcher? Just checking....

 

[yinepu]

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peroxide is safer for use since if there is a residue left behind it's non toxic to the embryo.. I know some people do use bleach on their eggs.. BUT the difference is they have found a safe way to use it.. in cleaning the incubators I always prefer to use peroxide because for the average person it's safer to use near developing embryos.. I know of several people personally who have used bleach and had a weird film show up in their bators where they add the water to raise humidity.. the only thing we could come up with is some of the added chemicals/ingredients that are put into bleach.. once they went with the method I use those strange films disappeared.. so while it may not have been the sodium hypochlorite itself.. it was whatever the manufacturing companies added to the sodium hypochlorite when they made it and packaged it for sale.

when i worked at the commercial hatchery they would come behind us and do a swab test for bacteria once we had cleaned the incubators and hatchers.. and even though the incubators and hatchers LOOKED spotless... occasionally there were some resistant bacteria left behind.. so we would have to go back with different chemicals and try to eradicate the resistant bacteria.. so if you do use a specific cleaner/disinfectant all the time.. there is a good chance that sooner or later you'll end up with a resistant strain of bacteria

 

[Gypsy07]

Thanks for the explanation. I understand exactly what you mean. It really just depends on what brand of household bleach you use then. I guess maybe I've been lucky to have picked one that works. Well, two or three really, since I've always just used whatever brand of bleach I happened to have under my kitchen sink at the time. Perhaps I shall think more carefully about what I'm using now! So do you buy hydrogen peroxide as granules, or as a liquid? And how does the price compare with plain bleach? I know we're in different countries so the info might not be entirely relevant to me, but I'm just interested. And yeah, I suppose bacteria can become resistant to anything, given enough time.

You worked at a big hatchery? Wow! Was that for commercial broilers, or layers, or one of the ones that does all different rare breeds? How many chicks did you hatch out in an average week? Did you swap around what disinfectants you used so you didn't get resistant bacteria? Man, I could ask you about a million different questions about it!

 

[yinepu]

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yeah.. bleach can have all kinds of stuff in it from added fragrance to surfactants.. so it really depends on the company .. and they country it's manufactured in as well as the individual batch

the peroxide i use is liquid.. and it's under a dollar a bottle.. have actually found some on sale for 5 for a dollar.. and that's when I stock up. So it's a little more expensive than really cheap bleach.. but since it's made to be used on skin/wounds.. the manufacturers tend to not mess with the ingredients as much as they do bleach. I never use it on wounds .. but it's good to have in a spray bottle for cleaning counters and appliances (alternating with vinegar) if you're trying to go more "natural"

I worked for Townsend's hatchery.. they grow broilers for different growers who then send them to the commercial processing plants which Townsends owned for their own "brand" of supermarket chicken.
At the hatchery where I worked we would have 20 to 30 hatchers per day hatching out chicks (depending which day of the week it was and what they needed for the broiler houses).. these hatchers were bigger than a walk in closet.. you could have easily fit a dozen people in one without any problem.. each hatcher held six "racks" which were tall metal racks on wheels.. and each rack held I believe 12 trays of eggs.. (it's been a few years since i worked there.. but it was either 12 or 15). and each tray held several hundred eggs.. it would take two people to flip each of the trays from the incubator trays to hatcher trays.. so we hatched out several hundred, thousand chicks each day

edited to add: oh.. for the disinfectants.. we had to rotate them.. and occasionally they would get in something new to try..some were like a mild soap and some were very caustic and if they came into contact with skin would eat it away like acid.. so we had to be careful how we handled everything

 

[seminolewind]

A bleach solution is fine. I rinse afterward and let dry. Household bleach dissipates into the air and disappears pretty quickly.