Our first 100% hatch rate!

[speckledhen]

It's great when you get the hang of it, huh? Congrats.

 

[skeeter9]

Nice work!!! Now, what kind of bator did you use and what were your temps, humidity, etc.? I like to know the details so I can keep tweaking my own hatching practices! LOL!

 

[Kentucky~Momma]

Sorry it took so long to respond, getting ready for day 18 again on Saturday, I will be moving about 23 more eggs to the hatcher, I will be candling them first so we will see how many actually get moved.

Our incubator is a Little Giant 9200 with the automatic egg turner. My husband has a pc fan rigged up in there so it is not a still air. Our temps in the incubator are 99.5 in the water wiggler and he says they stay between 98.8 and 100.5 outside of the wiggler at egg height. We use 2 different accurite thermometers/hygrometers in the incubator. The humidiy is kept between 30 and 50%.

The hatcher we have is an older incubator we got from our neighbor, it is just round and made of styrofoam with what looks like hardware mesh at the bottom in the hatcher we have only one thermometer/hygrometer and we have the probe located in the water wiggler and the temps stay pretty consistant at 99.5. Our humidity in the hatcher is approximately 70%.

I set all my eggs on Saturdays and we hatch all year round, I believe the only Saturday that we missed was last week, when we were picking up some sebrights from Dawn. So this week and next we will have babies and then a week off, then right back on since I will be setting close to 20 more on Saturday. (I have 20 babies living in the house right now in their brooders, ranging from 3 weeks all the way down to these 11 we hatched this week!)

I hope this helped.

 

[skeeter9]

Sure sounds like you have your system perfected. I can't imagine hatching that often - what in the world do you do with all of the chicks? At the moment I am limited to hatching every 4 weeks since I only have 1 bator and no hatcher. I'm working on remedying that with the help of all of the enablers on here - I'm working on the plans for a hatcher, then there will be no stopping me!!!!

I'd love to see your babies - are you gonna post pics?

 

[Kentucky~Momma]

We actually have a few people who buy our chicks from us as a straight run, and as they are older they also get sold as either the hen or rooster. We also sell eggs so that helps with the cost of all the feed. We have been searching for our camera, and can't seem to locate it, as soon as I do I will post pics of them all. I will see if I can find pics of our set ups as well.

(Oh, and we are in the middle of remodeling our master bath, and have sort of set that up with the brooders, and put the master bath on hold

I am hopelessly addicted)

 

[Dawn419]

K~M,

Our new Hova-Bator showed up just a bit before you did on Saturday to get the Sebrights. Had it set-up by Sunday and think I have it fine-tuned at this point (temp and humidity holding steady). Told Skip I was thinking about doing a test run in a few days so I started collecting today. I really expected him to have a fit, got a sly smile and no comment instead, so I'll take that as a "Go-for-it"!

Looking forward to seeing your pics! Give your gang a hug for us!

Dawn