Questions about dry hatch with silkie and regular chicken eggs….

[Lainey-chick]

I started my incubator (NR 360) and let it run for 24 hours. I have 10 silkie and 12 regular eggs to go in today. The humidity is staying right around 23-25%. Is this too low for a dry hatch? My house stays on the dryer side in the winter, so wondering if dry hatch will work for me? Of course I’ll raise it up when they go into lockdown.

I did a test run on my incubator a few months ago and set humidity and temp according to the directions. They were all fertile, but two of the eggs quit and did not hatch. I thought maybe I had the humidity too high.

 

[Yardmom]

Having a couple of quiters is not unusual when incubating eggs. I dry hatch, but my relative humidity is probably higher than yours. I know it is possible for the eggs to loose to much moisture, but I'm not sure what percentage is to dry. What humidity did you use for the last batch?

 

[Lainey-chick]

Having a couple of quiters is not unusual when incubating eggs. I dry hatch, but my relative humidity is probably higher than yours. I know it is possible for the eggs to loose to much moisture, but I'm not sure what percentage is to dry. What humidity did you use for the last batch?

I did what the instructions said and had it around 50%. The last three days I upped it to 65-70%.

 

[Obsessed With Silkies]

I did what the instructions said and had it around 50%. The last three days I upped it to 65-70%.

That's a pretty high jump in humidity from 20-25%. A normal dry hatch is 15-30% the first 18 days and the 60-65% the last three or lockdown. I incubate silkie eggs many time and I have found that a humidity of 40-45% the whole way through at 99.5 degrees worked best for me. The humidity stayed constant instead of being too low or too high which can drown the chick or cause problems with the chick. This is why I believe I have such success with this method. I have tried all kinds of hatching methods and after trying this one my hatch rates went from 10% to 90%.

 

[Lainey-chick]

That's a pretty high jump in humidity from 20-25%. A normal dry hatch is 15-30% the first 18 days and the 60-65% the last three or lockdown. I incubate silkie eggs many time and I have found that a humidity of 40-45% the whole way through at 99.5 degrees worked best for me. The humidity stayed constant instead of being too low or too high which can drown the chick or cause problems with the chick. This is why I believe I have such success with this method. I have tried all kinds of hatching methods and after trying this one my hatch rates went from 10% to 90%.

That was my reading last time I incubated eggs. I didn’t do a dry hatch last time, I just followed the instructions that came with the incubator.

I have the NR 360 incubator. Whenever I add water in pot A, it jumps up to really high 40s and low 50 range. I don’t know how to keep it consistent in the lower 40s.

 

[Obsessed With Silkies]

I'm not familiar with how the NR360 works but maybe try very little amounts of water at a time until it reaches your desired humidity