Little Giant Incubator Tricks

[cindy parker]

Excuse the typos in the last post

 

[duluthralphie]

One of men has the hard aero shell too...it's called "farm innovater " I think. It's actually full of eggs right now with 19 Easter eggers due to hatch Friday and the rest are blue marans and welsummers that should hatch in 19 days

I have 2 farm innovators with the hard plastic cover, I prefer them to my Little Giant. They were cheaper and seem tougher.

 

[duckmeister]

'Farm Innovator' is the brand as the one I have too.

My 5 gal bucket is working great so far, with the water chambers inside the incubator dry now the humidity is staying about 53%. Just a little trace of condensation around the edges of the plastic windows lets me know there's some humidity in there.

 

[cmom]

I had a brain fart. Fall Harvest is styrofoam too like the LG.

 

[duckmeister]

After a day of running totally dry, incubator went down to 30% . So filled one of the small chambers and brought it up to 40%, filled the bigger chamber only and it went up over 60%. Since I've had such lousy past hatches with it over 60, I'm aiming for 40-50. I've also noticed that temp raising from 99.5 to 105.5 will raise the humidity 10 or 15 % with water in the chambers, gotta really keep temp stable to get humidity stable in these small incubators.

Remembering back to the days in Oregon when I got 100% hatches in the basement on a concrete floor in one of those little round metal bators that used to hold 40 or 50 duck eggs. And they were lucky to get turned once a day, still always got over 90% hatch.

So i removed the 5 gal bucket, and filled a 16" diameter 4" high plastic water pan and put it on the floor, and put the bater on that, it's going to give all the bottom little pin hole sized air holes a chance to get a little humidity in the incubator, whereas the 5 gal bucket with a 10.5" diameter rim only allowed the bottom middle vent a chance to get any humidity. I'm thinking part of past success might have been bator on the conrete floor in the basement. More natural humidity closer to the ground I'm thinking. This house has central A/C so it's pretty easy to keep the temp around 70 consistantly, but the humidity is very dry. The bator room is about 8'×10' so i have in addition to the water pan the bator sits on, also two 5 gal buckets of water sitting in the room, keeping the door closed should help ring the natural humidity in the room up a bit i think.

Candled the call eggs this a.m. Eggs shipped from Indiana to California. Out of 31 eggs, 21 are alive growing and look good. Thankyou Duckcreekpoultryplace in Indiana for sending me 7 extra eggs in the shioment!

 

[duckmeister]

 

[duckmeister]

candled the eggs this a.m. day 16. 20 out of the 21 that were fertile the first candling are looking good. Almost tossed one, but looked again awhile later and could definitely see nice looking little blood vessels in there, good thing I looked again.

Definitely think my past problem was the humidity to high. Have been letting the incubator go totally dry and the humidity % goes down in the mid 30's or so, and just adding 1 straw of water when it goes dry will shoot it up to 60% or more. Using vents full open and full closed to try and keep a happy medium between 40% and 50% range. Air sacks on the eggs seem to be about right for the 16th day, so keeping my fingers crossed.

My altitude is just about 500 ft above sea level here, so the oxygen content of the air is better than it would be at higher altitudes. There are five 1/8" ventilation holes that come standard drilled into the bottom of the LG incubators and this Farm Innovator one too. And also eight 1/8" ventilation holes on the top of the incubator. When you couple that with a forced air fan, I don't think there is any way possible on this green earth that it would be possible to starve hatching ducklings for air, or cause a carbon dioxide poisoning condition inside the egg, just isn't possible with all those ventilation holes and a forced air fan. Maybe without the forced air fan, but with the forced air fan, i'm putting those 2 red caps in whenever I need to control humidity. Humidity on the high side- out they come! on the lower side and in they both go.

Seems I recall reading somewhere the red capped extra ventilation holes were for hatching at high level altitude's above 6 thousand feet or so where the air is thinner.

 

[Austinspoultry]

Justi will have my LG kit anytime now in the mail. I will be hatching out cochin Bantam's. Does anyone know if the quail racks will hold a bantam egg? Also what day do you guys go on lock down?

 

[Austinspoultry]

*in

 

[CGinJCMO]

I used regular egg turner cups for bantam eggs. I don't have quail to know how small they are but if you have regular size egg turner already, you don't need to get something smaller.

CG