Pip but no movement - shrink wrapped?

[slordaz]

View attachment 1935198

I've set up the new incubator, I've decided to call it the lambo of incubators in comparison to my old one lol! It's heated up extremely fast and I can actually hear the fan motoring away strongly inside. I'll leave it for a while and check the temp against the thermometer I have inside as well as the humidity, here's hoping it all works good and my australorp eggs will have a happy ending in a few weeks time!

nice looking set up. I finally found the link to one I was gonna have ya read too, just in case I missed anything.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/ar...hatching-chicken-eggs-aka-hatching-101.64195/

 

[OneFowlMama]

nice looking set up. I finally found the link to one I was gonna have ya read too, just in case I missed anything.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/ar...hatching-chicken-eggs-aka-hatching-101.64195/

That was honestly the best thread I've seen on incubating, thank you so so much! I'll definitely get a scale so I can weigh the eggs as well as just marking air cell growth with this next batch. My thermometer so far is reading a 1.5° lower difference in the new bator thus far but I just chucked another one in there for safe measure to make sure. I know you can adjust what temp you want this bator to be but I don't see any recalibration option in the manual so I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens before I go tinkering around with it lol. The humidity says it's at 24% so far as well so I might follow that thread and leave it as such for the first week of incubation and then add water to the basin depending on the weight loss after that. After losing that last battle I'm making sure I'm ready for the war this time around!

 

[slordaz]

That was honestly the best thread I've seen on incubating, thank you so so much! I'll definitely get a scale so I can weigh the eggs as well as just marking air cell growth with this next batch. My thermometer so far is reading a 1.5° lower difference in the new bator thus far but I just chucked another one in there for safe measure to make sure. I know you can adjust what temp you want this bator to be but I don't see any recalibration option in the manual so I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens before I go tinkering around with it lol. The humidity says it's at 24% so far as well so I might follow that thread and leave it as such for the first week of incubation and then add water to the basin depending on the weight loss after that. After losing that last battle I'm making sure I'm ready for the war this time around!

you can't re-calibrate the incubator one that I know of, so just play around moving temp up by a bit and waiting to see how much that brings it until you get it closer it has a temp it's supposed to be at I have one that I had it at 100.9F to get all the calibrated independent calibrated ones to read the 99.5F that it was supposed to be at, just so you are aware of that when incubating, I have a note book and go through this check each time to make sure it's right for the chicks. Glad I found that thread though, had to book mark it so won't loose it again lol.

 

[LynnaePB]

I'm so sorry to hear your bubs didn't make it.

It sounds like your approach to your next batch and having a better incubator should give you much better results though! I've personally had quite a bit of success with lower humidity incubation 25-35% the first 18 days then 60-75% the last 3 days. Air cells that are a little too large seem to be a lot more likely to hatch than eggs with air cells a little too small (at least in my experience).

Good luck, I hope you get a fantastic hatch rate with this next try!

 

[OneFowlMama]

My 12 australorp egg babies have just gone into the lambo! I sterilised my digital thermometer but its readings changed by 3°, the old fashion dial thermometer I had in the incubator matched with the incubators readings exactly so I decided to trust it's readings, it's the most credited incubator by breeders in my country which is why I purchased it so even though I'm very nervous I'm just going to trust it and see how we go...

I haven't added water into it, but I did weigh each egg and mark the air cells before placing them into it so I'll take them out to candle on day 8 and see what the scale and candle says for weight loss and guage it from there. The hygrometer was reading between 18-20% humidity with no water with the lowest reading being 17% so we'll see. But I'd rather have too much cell growth than too little because as I now know I can just bump the humidity up on day 8 to equalise it better for the bubs needs. I don't want drowned chicks to be a problem again! Fingers crossed it all works out well, hopefully all the breeders recommendations are right and it's a machine that'll need little to no tinkering except lowering the temp during hatch... Time will tell. Thank you all so so so much for all the information, guidance and tips - hopefully with all this knowledge and lessons learnt I'll be a blessed mama in no time!

 

[slordaz]

Good luck with this hatch

 

[Kiki]

Keep your humidity closer to 35 throughout and only bump it up to about 50 once you see the first external pip.

Good luck this time.

 

[OneFowlMama]

Just giving an update on my second batch of blue australorp eggs in the new incubator!

I placed the 12 eggs in and candles and weighed 10 days later, I was very shocked and disheartened to see 3 infertile eggs, 2 developing eggs and a whopping 7 blood ringed eggs. I doubke checked with the thermometers and the temp was fine, the air cells were appropriate and the weight had dropped the perfect amount for that time.

At the time I bought the eggs my sister also purchased 3 dozen unfertilised eggs to cook with, the next day we walked into her kitchen and had discovered every single egg was absolutely off the chart stinking rotten! He had told us both the fertile eggs and the ones she purchased were laid 2 days prior to purchase which definitely wasn't the case with hers.

By day 15 one of the developing eggs had sadlt passed and things were looking grim. I placed the one lonely egg in the incubator and waited. Day 18 came and the weight was good and development was strong.

Today is day 21 and I had heard no cheeps and seen no pips by 5pm and felt the hope dwindling. I went outside to put my geese to bed and came back inside at 5:30 to hear cheeps! I rushed to the lambo and was greeted by one perfect chick running around! It's umbilical cord has now detached and it's finally fallen asleep and is beginning to fluff out, I'm feeling alot better now I've had one success story.

Can older eggs typically blood ring by chance? I've tried to google but it's a bit of a confusion to really pinpoint whether that is the case. As my thermometer said the temp was fine and I have one healthy chick I just don't know for sure whether it's something to do with the incubator or the eggs. Any insight would be appreciated so much! Thank you all on this thread again for guiding me through this hatch, while not as successful as I had hoped I'm very grateful to have been blessed with welcoming one new bub into this world!

 

[LynnaePB]

Just giving an update on my second batch of blue australorp eggs in the new incubator!

I placed the 12 eggs in and candles and weighed 10 days later, I was very shocked and disheartened to see 3 infertile eggs, 2 developing eggs and a whopping 7 blood ringed eggs. I doubke checked with the thermometers and the temp was fine, the air cells were appropriate and the weight had dropped the perfect amount for that time.

At the time I bought the eggs my sister also purchased 3 dozen unfertilised eggs to cook with, the next day we walked into her kitchen and had discovered every single egg was absolutely off the chart stinking rotten! He had told us both the fertile eggs and the ones she purchased were laid 2 days prior to purchase which definitely wasn't the case with hers.

By day 15 one of the developing eggs had sadlt passed and things were looking grim. I placed the one lonely egg in the incubator and waited. Day 18 came and the weight was good and development was strong.

Today is day 21 and I had heard no cheeps and seen no pips by 5pm and felt the hope dwindling. I went outside to put my geese to bed and came back inside at 5:30 to hear cheeps! I rushed to the lambo and was greeted by one perfect chick running around! It's umbilical cord has now detached and it's finally fallen asleep and is beginning to fluff out, I'm feeling alot better now I've had one success story.

Can older eggs typically blood ring by chance? I've tried to google but it's a bit of a confusion to really pinpoint whether that is the case. As my thermometer said the temp was fine and I have one healthy chick I just don't know for sure whether it's something to do with the incubator or the eggs. Any insight would be appreciated so much! Thank you all on this thread again for guiding me through this hatch, while not as successful as I had hoped I'm very grateful to have been blessed with welcoming one new bub into this world! View attachment 1952869

Congratulations on hatching your first little one!

I'm so sorry things didn't go smoothly and the eggs were of suspect age. I once tried incubating a clutch of eggs I'd been collecting for around 22 days, I got a pretty good hatch rate but definitely lost more than was normal. A few quit early and several made it to lockdown but were unable to hatch and I do believe most of the ones that didn't make it were past 2 weeks old.

Seeing that your sisters eggs were rotten I would guess you may have got so many blood rings from bacteria (maybe the eggs weren't kept in the most sanitary of conditions or had the protective bloom washed off making them more susceptible to bacteria entering into the egg)? It's always possible there was something that happened with the incubator (like a temperature spike) but seeing as your sisters eggs were obviously not freshly laid I'd think it more likely you didn't get good eggs.

Hopefully someone with more experience with old eggs will chime in, if you can get your hands on some good eggs that should let you know if it's a problem with your incubator or with the previous batch of eggs. If I were in your position and was going to buy fertile eggs from someone I'd want to know how old the eggs were, if they'd been washed, and I'd candle to see how big the air cell is once I got them (they should be small, not much bigger than a dime in diameter if they are less than a weak old).

I grabbed a couple of my silkie eggs to show how the air cell looks in a fresh egg compared to an egg a little over a weak old (I didn't have any older eggs unfortunately). The first is an egg that was laid probably around 5 hours ago, the second is one that was laid on the 29th of October and is 8 days old (please excuse the scribbles, I mark based on who I think laid the egg).

 

[slordaz]

older eggs, and from sounds of it they weren't kept properly. To get 1 chick to hatch you did good. Personally I don't set them if they are over 7-10 days old as they are less likely to hatch even kept at optimal conditions. Sounds like you need to be finding a different source of eggs for hatching.
@Ridgerunner
May have some more information, also there is a section in the learning center on this kind of thing.

Forgot also when having eggs shipped you should let them sit unmolested for 24 hours, also elevations difference from lay to hatch can affect your hatch