Question about homemade incubators.

[KaylorFarms]

I was wondering, If I made a homemade incubator, what is my hatch rate? I heard it can lower to 33% because you can't keep the humidity stable. What are your thoughts? I heard yo ucan put a bowl of water in there for humidity.

 

[kodipilla]

some information here...

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/humidity-in-homemade-incubator.624690/

 

[gpop1]

I was wondering, If I made a homemade incubator, what is my hatch rate? I heard it can lower to 33% because you can't keep the humidity stable. What are your thoughts? I heard yo ucan put a bowl of water in there for humidity.

Ive made lots of incubators. Some designs require large pans of water to keep the humidity up and others require no water at all during incubation. None were unstable.

 

[savannahRoos22]

Ive made lots of incubators. Some designs require large pans of water to keep the humidity up and others require no water at all during incubation. None were unstable.

Do you have ideas, pictures and methods? Im so glad yours worked, is there any way you could share some information on the ones you have?

 

[IncubatorWarehouse.com]

This is a pretty open ended question, unfortunately there are too many variables to associate a hatch rate to any one incubator, homemade or manufactured.

 

[gpop1]

Before building a incubator you need to understand that stable humidity is not that important. At the end of incubation you are trying to end up with a correctly sized air cell for the chick to use during hatch.
There are charts on the net that show the air cell size to day of incubation so you can adjust the average humidity required as you go. Any adjustment to the humidity can take days before it shows in the air cell which is why controlling the humidity is not that important.

Temperature stability is much more important. A degree swing up and down wont hurt but a large 4-5 degree swing wouldn't be a good idea.
The internal temp of the egg needs to stay around 99.5 degrees F. The internal temp takes a while to change so a minor temp swing due to the heater cycling will have very little affect to the internal temp but a long large temp swing can. Also there is a upper limit of 106 degrees internal that is guaranteed to be terminal.


This is a link to one I built and its still running today.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/building-a-incubator-from-a-wine-cooler.976303/

The most important thing you can do with any incubator home built or purchased is to test the unit for at least 2 day before using it.