possibly looking for incubator

[indianawelsumm]

I am looking into buying an incubator any recomendatiions as to brand and type. It would be for hatching around 15 to 20 chickens a year. Looking for ease of use. Thanks for any help given.

 

[gabrielle1976]

LG with fan and turner works ok if you can keep it in a place with constant temps and you can learn how to tweek it without huge temp diffrenaces. It would get a C Probly as bators go. With fan and turner your looking at about 120 ish or so
Hovabator with fan and turner reg Its a good bator pretty simple like the LG it needs a nice constant temp no large changes in room temp and all that again carefull with the adjustments . It would probly get a B- with fan and turner 165 ish
Hovabator genisis 1588 with fan and turner, this one is digital and more state of the art , it can take a tad more change then the others can and everyone seems to think it works pretty darn good . B+ with turner woud probly be 190 ish or so
After that we move into the realm of brinsea R-com Turn X ect those ranging from 200-600+ with turners and the lowest priced ones being the little eco that only holds 8 eggs. There is alot of quality and price diffrence in these and I dont have enough information to make a great guess at them ( I nly had my mini eco for 1 day befor it broke but Im hopeing that was just a fluke

) These are sapose to be the A list table top incubators.
Stromberg usually has decent prices theres are a tad higher then some but thats becuase there shipping is free. But you have to shop around like when I got my mini eco it was cheaper for me to buy it from the brinsea site even with the 20 in shipping but if I had got the 20 eco it would have been 10 cheaper to get it at strombergs.

 

[kizanne]

If I had known my hubby was going to buy the incubator , the fan , the turner, I probably would have went with a slightly more expensive better reviewed incubator. However, I sent him to the store to get parts for a homemade incubator (which he was then expected to build). He went to TSC instead of Lowe's but he did get me all the goodies such as the fan and the turner. We added a little portable temp humidity gage that shows now, high and low. Plus we kept the two manual temp gages that came with it.

My point being I'd probably thrown a little more money at it and bought the hovorbator or a brinsea, but since I didn't I can tell you.

I've had success the my Little Giant. I thought I'd only use it one ever two years to hatch out replacement hens. However now I have hatch fever and I'm on my second hatch with more in the bator. I ran out this spring and bought just the LG unit for $40 and made it into a hatcher so that I have an incubator and a hatcher, still haven't spent that much because LG is cheap. There is a thread here dedicated to LG's where you can see the up, down and more importantly how to make it work relatively well.

My last hatch I had a very high hatch rate on the eggs that developed. I don't blame clear, infertile eggs on the bator nor do I blame the egg I dropped.

I started with 45 eggs I now have 33 in the hatcher which I feel pretty good about their chances of hatching. But out of the 12 not hatching 10 were from infertile completely clear on the candle at 14 days. Only 2 were quitters.

I have had very little trouble holding temp or humidity. I find if I incubate in my house in a room that we don't use, away from the window and not in front of the air conditioning vent. And if I keep the whole house thermostat on the same temp it works really well and is very stable. However if thing in the room change the LG has trouble 'perfectly' holding temp. Such as I didn't get the hatcher til about 3 days ago. When I plugged it in, in the same room. My incubator LG went up to about 102 (because the room was now hotter). I had to adjust it down. Adjusting an LG is tricky but can be done. But if you keep the room stable the LG is stable. I'll follow this up, Monday with my hatch rate from what is currently in the bator (shipped eggs).