Questions About Dickey's Brand Cabinet Incubators

[RattleCan]

Hello all, I'm looking into purchasing a cabinet incubator that can hold about 200-300 eggs. I've pretty well narrowed down the choices to a Dickey's incubator or the GQF 1502. I'm sure the Brinsea is great too but they cost significantly more for what I believe is a cabinet if equal quality to the others mentioned, so I don't think I'll be getting that one.

My questions are mostly for those with Dickey's incubators.

1. Does the door of the cabinet have a window on it? Or is the "all acrylic door" an almost necessary add on if you want to see the eggs without constantly opening the incubator?

2. Is it worth the extra $100 to buy the version with the electronic thermostat and digital hygrometer vs the dual wafer style thermometer/hygrometer?

3. Does hatching in the hatching tray really work? I incubate my turkey eggs at 30-35% humidity and hatch at 70%, I'm just not sure how efficient it could be since everyone I've ever talked to says to raise humidity for hatching.

4. Is the automatic humidity system useful at all? Or is it easy to just add the water myself?

5. Does anyone actually recommend the GQF (or any other brand) over the Dickey's?

Thanks everyone!

 

[azjustin]

1. Does the door of the cabinet have a window on it? Or is the "all acrylic door" an almost necessary add on if you want to see the eggs without constantly opening the incubator?

If you're a "hands on" hatcher then you definitely want the all acrylic door. But, read about the hatcher at the bottom. Incubating only doesn't need any visuals.

2. Is it worth the extra $100 to buy the version with the electronic thermostat and digital hygrometer vs the dual wafer style thermometer/hygrometer?

I'm a digital guy in a digital world, the wafers make a good backup but don't replace the main t-stat in my game.

3. Does hatching in the hatching tray really work? I incubate my turkey eggs at 30-35% humidity and hatch at 70%, I'm just not sure how efficient it could be since everyone I've ever talked to says to raise humidity for hatching.

You're probably going to want a separate hatcher, see below.

4. Is the automatic humidity system useful at all? Or is it easy to just add the water myself?

The automatic system is a float for the pan, hose to the outside of the incubator, and a seal for the hose to go into the bucket. If you're unsure about the pieces, order the kit without the bucket and it will save you a significant amount of $$ on shipping. Adding water to the tray manually is a PITA, the auto system is pretty mandatory unless your RH is already high to begin with. Although the pieces are pretty easy to understand, they are tried and true for the incubators.

5. Does anyone actually recommend the GQF (or any other brand) over the Dickey's?

I have no experience with GQF but from the tomes I've read: Mr. Dickey (or staff) will always answer the phone, help out with any questions, ship on a Sunday, and actually work with you. Maybe even some positive reinforcement GQF is: leave a message and we will call you back (3 days later). Dickey was also $100 cheaper.

Hatching in the Dickey incubator is fine if you're only doing 30-50 birds a week. But, since there is no real way to control the humidity, you are at the mercy of spray bottles and upping the humidity of the entire incubator. This is fine (we hatched 100s and 100s of chicks this way) but it doesn't work well once you start doing 50-100 birds and want to fine tune the humidity. Turks need more humidity from what I understand, I would be cautious about doing them inside any combo incubator/hatcher. I have zero experience with this, hopefully someone else will tell us different.

If I was to do it again, we would have gotten an incubator and immediately built a 5 tray hatcher, instead of waiting to build one. When we did, we just copied the Dickey incubator, ordered the electronics from them, and built our own trays. Saved about $400.

I know I've left something out here.