I have a Farm Innovators Pro series (forced-air) incubator. I have had a successful hatch before, but this batch seems to be sketchy. Last batch of eggs didn't work out because my cat chewed the temp knob and cooked my eggs. Sometimes he thinks he is a dog. Anyway, this batch now was setup just like the first one. Temp has been good at 99.5 (used 2 meters), and knob has been shielded so no interference can happen again...and humidity standards are the same per instructions. Candling seemed good like before. I have brown eggs so I really can't see anything, but I am able to tell the difference between clear and dark mass which usually increases over time. When I candle the eggs before lockdown, they usually have mass over 50% and you can see where the air space is. This time they were at 50% or less dark. Day 21 would have been Dec 5th. Nothing has happened. I checked the forum posts here to find out how to do the water test, and did that on the 10th. Out of the 40 eggs, only 1 was a sinker (which I had kind of suspected to be a quitter), but the others were low floaters (viable, developed eggs). I swear 2 of the eggs shook in the bator (without my disturbance). I patted all other eggs dry and returned them to bator asap, with some distilled water to bump up the humidity to 75. I read one post from awhile back where someone had a few hatches at about 30 days. I will be approaching that time frame soon. Any comments or suggestions? The only thing different I can think about this time is that I added like 4 or 5 small black rocks (cleaned and sanitized) into the bator because I read someone using that technique to warm the cool spots.
Some eggs late, it's normal, all 40 eggs late, that must be temp problem. Where do you place the thermometers? Do you have any picture of your incubator and surrounding area?
It really sounds like your temps have been running way low or you miscalculated your days/wrote down wrong set day. If you still have viable eggs, bump your temps up a tiny bit & let them keep going.
If those eggs are still alive it's quite possible that the temperature is too low. Put a different thermometer in the incubator and check the temperature reading. I once messed up a hatch because the thermometer we used was faulty. It was reading a few degrees too low and we cooked most of the eggs
