NR 360 Humidity

[CollieCountess]

I have having a horrendous time with my new NR 360 and humidity.

For context, I'm in south Texas with 80% humidity, however this incubator is inside.

I am struggling to maintain a constant steady humidity. Every time I refill even a tiny bit, it swings up to 60% and then a few hours later it's down in the 30s. I do have a thermopro in there and I'm taking the readings off of it.

The vent is halfway open, and I've tried just closing it more without adding water, and that tends to take the humidity into the 60s again, but then it will also drop it back to the 30's 4-6 hours later.

Suggestions and help would be appreciated. I know a lot of people have great things to say about this incubator, and I'm positive I'm doing something wrong.

 

[Debbie292d]

I used one of those for a year. I made it work as we're in the same situation as you, high humidity outdoors, but inside it's kept to 40%. That doesn't seem to work for an incubator though, as with no water in it, it falls far below that.

There are two red port covers. I found myself using both ports most of the time to try maintain between 40-50% for longer periods of time.

At lockdown, if I filled both ports to overflowing, that would do it. My goal was 70% and it would nearly get there.

There are some posts about making wicks to draw water into it, but I never tried those. What I did if I took the lid off to candle was ball up a wet paper towel and throw that in there when I was done so it didn't take long to get back up to upper 40s.

Now with three Brinseas that have automatic humidity, I set what I want, and it keeps it there.

 

[Windy136]

Dealing with this right now myself. I did my first dry hatch with the NR 360 because I was so sick of dealing with the humidity it was either too low or ridiculously high. We live in TN so my humidity has stayed around 40%. You can fold up a piece of a paper towel and put it under part of the lid where it doesnt close all the way. This has helped me some in the past to lower the humidity by around 5-10%.

 

[SweetieChicken234]

I use my NR 360 to dry incubate. I'm in Florida with horrendous humidity. Inside when I run it dry it stays around 30-35% humidity. I add water at lockdown and it stays around 55%. Chicks hatch great.

 

[Chad Oftedal]

I just finished hatching a batch of eggs a couple weeks ago in an NR360. I used a ThermoWorks sensor to track temp and hummidity. I had my incubator in our store room for the entire hatch. In my observation, the most the humidity swung when I added water in the mornings was about 8%, then settled back down to a stable reading after about two hours, roughly.

I feel like your ThermoPro may not be giving you completely accurate readings. To be sure, I'd trust it more than the built-in one that comes with the incubator, but a nearly 30% swing by just adding through the "A" port seems pretty excessive. My baseline humidity in the incubator - before I added eggs or water was around 25% on average. This was observed over a week before adding eggs and water. For my hatch, the highest I could get by topping off the "A" side was about 45% on average. It would spike when adding more water, but it leveled out at around 45%. Early on, I had a couple of "crashes" where my humidity dropped down to the 25% baseline again. That told me that I was running dry on my water in "A". What I learned was that when using a squeeze bottle to add water, it took a lot more than what a thought to fill the channel. I think it's deceptive when adding water that way just how much is going in there. I definitely liked using a squeeze bottle as folks had recommended, but just learned for myself that it adds water slowly when going that way.

If it were me, I'd make sure I was confidently filling channel "A" to capacity. If possible, getting another ThermoPro to measure your room humidity outside, next to the incubator might give you a rough approximation for the difference. Granted, it's not going to be exact because they aren't a matched calibrated set, but it should help give you a ballpark idea. When you're adding water, my gut tells me that your ThermoPro might be swinging higher than what your'e actually at - maybe overshooting a bit? How quickly does it come back down to your stable reading? I'm not saying it's wrong, certainly your house and condidtions are different from what I have here, but it just feels like a really big swing. If it is rather quickly dropping back to the more stable reading, it would lead me to question whether the peak spikes are really that high. For me, it took about 2.5 hours to come down from an 8% spike to my stable reading. If you're dropping a lot faster than that, it would just make me wonder. Again, there are a lot of variables here, these are just things to consider.

Some other notes from my experience with the NR360:

• The built-in temperature sensor was about 1.5 degrees low compared to my SensorPush.
• The built-in humidity sensor was a good 5-8% low compared to my SensorPush up until the time I entered lockdown. Surprisingly, when the water in channel "A" and "B" was maxed out, it read pretty true to my SensorPush. I only incubated based on my SensorPush readings, but it was interesting to compare the two.
• The SensorPush fits perfectly in the center space and takes up no additional room which was a neat bonus.
• Because of the temp difference, I had to run my incubator at 101 for the first 18 days, then 102 in lockdown with the extra water to keep tha desired 99-99.5 target.
• Don't sweat the early hiccups in humidity fluctuations. Make it a habit to check early on and get a feel for the ranges, and hopefully things will settle in and you'll know roughly when to add water to keep it fairly consistent. In my case realizing I wasn't fully filling channel "A" was key, and once I got that down, I kept things dialed in more consistent.
• The ability of the SensorPush to be read wirelessly and push humidity and temp notifications to my phone was great. I've got a number of SensorPush units, but I've never used the monitoring feature where it would notify you when you were out of range. That was really slick. I also love that I can download all the reading data to a CSV for analysis, but I'm a bit of a data nerd, so definitely not for everyone.
• In hindsight, I wish I had practiced filling channel "A" with my squeeze bottle without the incubator sitting on top. That way I could have visualized how much of the bottle it took to fill up the channel. I eventually got there through trial and error, but it'd have been handy to know that ahead of time.