Hello, I'm new here but have been raising chickens for a couple years. I have a Hova-Bator 1602 incubator and have successfully incubated and hatched at least 10 batches of eggs with 90+% hatching!.....until recently.
My hatch rate has been going down the last 3 incubation runs....and I thought my incubator was going bad cause I was having trouble controlling the temperature. So I ordered another incubator, the exact same model. Well, turns out my incubator was fine, it was my humidity/temp gauge so I ordered new of those as well.
Started 2 batches of eggs with 40 in each. Temps were perfect, did humidity and turning eggs, etc as I have always done with great success. And like the last 2 hatches, when we got to day 20-21, very few eggs piped or hatched. Humidity was around 60% and then got higher as chicks started hatching. Of the appx 70 that candled OK, only 28 hatched and several of those died with funky legs or couldn't stand. And it was about equal low success on each incubator, so I'm wondering if humidity is my problem. I'm in western Kansas and it is very dry here. Humidity in my house runs at 30%.
Looking for any ideas on what to do. Many eggs did appear to have a dry looking membrane and some I had to help and the membrane was almost stuck on them!
I checked many of the eggs that did not hatch and most were fully formed chicks.
My hatch rate has been going down the last 3 incubation runs....and I thought my incubator was going bad cause I was having trouble controlling the temperature. So I ordered another incubator, the exact same model. Well, turns out my incubator was fine, it was my humidity/temp gauge so I ordered new of those as well.
Started 2 batches of eggs with 40 in each. Temps were perfect, did humidity and turning eggs, etc as I have always done with great success. And like the last 2 hatches, when we got to day 20-21, very few eggs piped or hatched. Humidity was around 60% and then got higher as chicks started hatching. Of the appx 70 that candled OK, only 28 hatched and several of those died with funky legs or couldn't stand. And it was about equal low success on each incubator, so I'm wondering if humidity is my problem. I'm in western Kansas and it is very dry here. Humidity in my house runs at 30%.
Looking for any ideas on what to do. Many eggs did appear to have a dry looking membrane and some I had to help and the membrane was almost stuck on them!
I checked many of the eggs that did not hatch and most were fully formed chicks.
