Power Outage

[bobshere]

I’m having a power outage for 3 hours on Monday. I presently have 2 Brinsea Incubators running. Will be day 15 by Monday. I’m wondering if anyone has used a generator for powering a Brinsea incubator. Not sure what I should do.

 

[NatJ]

I’m having a power outage for 3 hours on Monday. I presently have 2 Brinsea Incubators running. Will be day 15 by Monday. I’m wondering if anyone has used a generator for powering a Brinsea incubator. Not sure what I should do.

3 hours, and you know in advance?
Put a few towels or big blankets over and around the incubators an hour or more before the outage starts, and leave them there until after the power comes back on. No peeking. The eggs should be fine.

The towels or blankets get warmed up, and help keep heat in. Because they do not create heat, they will not overheat your eggs, so you don't have to worry about watching the temperature. The eggs themselves create some heat too, which will help keep it warm.


I have never run an incubator from a generator, but I assume it would work fine. Just keep an eye on the thermometer, in case it does something strange. But if you do not already have a generator, I would not go buy one for this purpose.

If you want to wade through some dense text, here's an article on Brinsea's website about eggs getting chilled:
https://www.brinsea.com/Articles/Advice/PowerOff.aspx
If I correctly understand it, your eggs will probably be fine. It talks about how much chilling at which ages of eggs causes what kind of damage, and it specifically points out that what really matters is the temperature inside the egg, which takes a while to change. So even if the incubator's air temperature drops too low, the eggs themselves can still be fine.

 

[cyfarian]

On day 15, my LID came off overnight somehow and the eggs felt room temp. (This was last month). I feared all of the chicks died, but they all survived that night and I had an 80% hatch rate. I did a lot of panic reading and found studies show that periodic cooling actually had higher hatch rates.

Now, I think mine were cooled far beyond the amount of time to increase hatch rates so I wouldn't recommend cooling for a whole night. The two that didn't hatch were still alive when I put them into lockdown.

Bottom line is three hours with some towels or blankets WITHOUT OPENING THE LID and you should be completely fine.