Since I am still having issues with getting the temp stable in my LG (although I am behaving and not touching the knob) I decided to quickly candle my duck eggs this morning. We are about 2 hours shy of starting day 6 so I thought it would be an ok time to check for progress. Out of 24 eggs that we set, 21 have veining and 3 are clear. We are going to leave the 3 clears in there for now though just in case they should decide to do something.
We don't want to mess with the temp knob too much but every morning the temp is up to 102.7 in the incubator and we are worried that we are going to cook the eggs so we are going to try to change some things. We are starting by turning the fan around. Right now it is blowing down on the eggs, we are going to turn it so it points towards the top of the incubator so it pulls the air up through instead of blowing down. We are hoping that helps.
I noticed when I candled that the eggs with the most veining/visible development are the eggs directly under the fan which is what got me thinking about moving the fan. My thought is that the air temp is highest at that point so perhaps the air is hitting those eggs and deflecting to the eggs around them. The eggs around the fan are at varied stages of development so I am thinking the fan is working to keep the temps around it the most stable. The eggs farthest away are the 3 clears and the eggs that are about (if I had to guess) a day or so behind the eggs under the fan so perhaps the air is just a bit too cool there. Hopefully swapping positions of the fan will help circulate the air more evenly and then if we do adjust the knob a tiny bit down everything will stabilize.
We are also adding a freezer thermometer to monitor the temps (it monitors to 104 degrees F). We are using the same
Walmart thermometer that a lot of people like but we don't know how to calibrate it since it doesn't have a probe and we don't own a thermometer that we know is accurate. The freezer thermometer in certified to be accurate and we like that the probe is in a bottle of glycol which will fit nicely into our turner and should give us a better idea of the temp inside the eggs. I wouldn't think that we would have 21/24 eggs developing well if the high air temps were doing damage but I would feel a lot better knowing that we weren't going to lose all of these eggs because of wonky air temps.
Either way, something is working so we are excited!! Now I can't wait till Sunday to add my chicken eggs
)
