Name Change, My First Experience with Farm Innovators Bator

[iamfivewire]

Good luck with your upcoming hatch .
Of the original 21 i set initally , we had 15 make it to day 18 lockdown - 13 have hatch & hoping the remaining 2 do in next day or so. The incubator held the temp pretty good, but had constant humidity drops - i bought a room humidifier to increase our dry 16% air humidity & that seemed to help , so i wasnt having to add water as often to try to maintainaround 30% . We increased to high 70's % after lockdown - seemed to work out ok for our hatch.

 

[A roo or two]

Well I am back at it, just set the whole incubator full, I have had it running for 5 days before setting, I added 8 Ziploc baggies partially filled with water around the outer perimeter of the bottom tray under the wire floor for thermal mass, and I picked up a thermometer I trust to be accurate, I think that was my problem last time, when comparing with the cheapo thermometer which came with the incubator I see the actual temp is much cooler than the cheapo shows. I believe the thermal mass in addition to running a full batch of eggs this time will make the temp run much more steadily.
I took the time to candle all the eggs and make sure there are no cracks and fairly decent shell composition. Also my first run ran many clear eggs, now my eggs pretty much all been fertile when cooking with them, I think the warmer weather has hopefully helped. I am optimistic about this batch, I am not going to ad water unless my humidity drops down into the 25 percent range, I want to shoot for mid 30s I think.

I was happy with my incubator and its first trial. I had 21 of 32 hatch out. A couple of those that didn't hatch looked as if they quit around day 18/19 and the others just failed to ever pip but were fully developed, some did internally but that was it. I just feel survival of the fittest and if something doesn't progress there's a reason. I am doing a second clutch of eggs at this time, on day 5. Full bator at 41 eggs.

Let me know how it goes with the baggies of water. I think it's hard to keep it "exact" for humidity and temp through the whole 21 days as it is affected by the room temperature/humidity(I leave all plugs out). I do notice about a 0.5 degree fluctuation in temp even with this set. But when I did a 24 hour average it was 99.5 last time.

Good luck with your upcoming hatch and keep us posted

 

[A roo or two]

Good luck with your upcoming hatch .
Of the original 21 i set initally , we had 15 make it to day 18 lockdown - 13 have hatch & hoping the remaining 2 do in next day or so. The incubator held the temp pretty good, but had constant humidity drops - i bought a room humidifier to increase our dry 16% air humidity & that seemed to help , so i wasnt having to add water as often to try to maintainaround 30% . We increased to high 70's % after lockdown - seemed to work out ok for our hatch.

I have the opposite issue, being in Florida and with high humidity, mine wants to go up. I have to kick the air on to suck humidity out of the house and it goes back down. Sounds like you are having a pretty great hatch so far, hope the other two start arriving soon.

 

[iamfivewire]

Thanx - considering weve only been raising chickens less than a year & this was our "trial run" with the same incubator youve got, we think we got pretty satisfactory results . there will prob be a few things we will "tweek" when we hatch again most likely, but we were overall pretty happy with the farm innovations model 4200.

 

[blucoondawg]

I am convinced the water bags help. I ran the incubator Empty for almost a week no eggs only water bags and temp didn't budge. Maybe a tiny amount I don't have digital thermometer so a can't see minute fluctuation

 

[blucoondawg]

My house is bone dry with the furnace running constantly however my incubator with a full load of eggs has a humidity of almost 60%, I have not added any water, this is just from the moisture in the eggs I am certain, I didn't think it should be that high, maybe I should pull a plug out? Or maybe just leave it? I don't know.

 

[A roo or two]

I am convinced the water bags help. I ran the incubator Empty for almost a week no eggs only water bags and temp didn't budge. Maybe a tiny amount I don't have digital thermometer so a can't see minute fluctuation

Well that's good to know. I use a digital and mine only fluctuates about half a degree but with a 24 hour average of right where I want it.

My house is bone dry with the furnace running constantly however my incubator with a full load of eggs has a humidity of almost 60%, I have not added any water, this is just from the moisture in the eggs I am certain, I didn't think it should be that high, maybe I should pull a plug out? Or maybe just leave it? I don't know.

hmm, are you sure one of the bags doesn't have a leak? My house runs at 55% humidity on average and my incubator is only at 33%.

 

[blucoondawg]

Bags aren't leaking

 

[A roo or two]

Huh, well that's good. wonder what's causing it to be so high.

 

[blucoondawg]

I can only assume it's the eggs doing it. I owned both vents and it's still around 40