New Hatcher...Please Help

[Peggy-Sue]

We are just starting our second batch of eggs, we put them in the incubator at 9:00 a.m. and we have some questions that have been getting mixed answers on. Our first hatch didn't go well we didn't have any hatch

so we want to get this right this time because we really want to have some Maran chicks!


Question #1:

When does one day start? We have heard once you put them in the incubator day one starts and also we have seen it doesn't start until 24 hours after putting them into the incubator? So what does everyone think?


Question #2:


Do you put the eggs on lockdown at the beginning of day 18 or AFTER day 18 so technically the beginning of day 19?


Please help!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Question #1:
When does one day start? We have heard once you put them in the incubator day one starts and also we have seen it doesn't start until 24 hours after putting them into the incubator? So what does everyone think?

Yeah it gets confusing. It seems that Day 1 should be when you start but it’s not. There is even a hatching calendar going around this forum that has it wrong.

An egg does not have a day’s worth of development 2 seconds or 2 hours after you put it in the incubator. It takes 24 hours for it to have a day’s worth of development. An easy way to check yourself is that the day of the week you start them is the day of the week they should hatch. If you start them on a Friday, they should hatch on a Friday.

What makes it even more confusing is that there are several different things that can cause them to hatch early or late, things like heredity, humidity, how and how long you store them before you start, even size of the egg. The big one is average incubating temperature. If the incubator is running a little warm they can hatch two or even three days early. If it is cool, they can be just as late. It’s not a precise science, but if you are fine-tuning your incubator, the 21 days of development is what you should shoot for. I’ve had eggs pipping when I went into lockdown and they still hatched.

Question #2:
Do you put the eggs on lockdown at the beginning of day 18 or AFTER day 18 so technically the beginning of day 19?

They should go into lockdown after 18 full days of development. I get confused talking about Day 18 or Day 19, so I’ll use days of development. Again, that is theory and what I’d shoot for the first time. Once you get experience with your incubator you might want to adjust that a little bit. There are a lot of different things going on during lockdown but my main goal is to have them in lockdown before they pip. I failed in that my first couple of incubations and still had good hatches.