I set my eggs on 13h00. I am approaching day 18 at 13h00 today and would like to know at what time in day 18 do I lockdown. This is also my very first incubation and am unsure as I have read it must be at the end of day 18 only.
Please help as I would really like to get it right. I have 22 eggs that have all shown growth. I also will be candling them before I put them in lockdown
The supplier of my incubator said I don't need to up the humidity and that I can keep it as is. 60 - 65% . But of what I have read it does seem to me that I would have to up the humidity to at least 70 - 75% . (Anyway that is also what my gut feeling tells me).
The exact timing of lockdown is not that important. When you go into lockdown you stop turning the eggs. If you wished you could stop turning them a few days earlier, that timing is not that critical. The main reasons you turn them is that it helps body parts form in the right places and it stops the yolk or developing chick from touching the inside of the egg shell and getting stuck. By about 14 days the body parts have formed and a membrane has developed around the chick that protects it from sticking to the shell. If you wanted to you could stop turning after 14 days, it will not harm the chick at all.
It’s fairly important that the egg loses a certain amount of moisture before it hatches. The air cell needs to grow big enough so the chick can breathe the air in it after internal pip long enough to finish doing other things it needs to do before hatch. But if the incubator is too dry during hatch that membrane that protects the chick from sticking to the inside of the shell can dry up and shrink, we call that shrink wrap. That dried-out membrane prevents the chick from moving so it can hatch. That’s why we up the humidity during lockdown and many of us advise against opening the incubator during hatch unless you have a real reason to open it.
The good news with the moisture loss is that there is a fairly wide range of moisture loss that works. Some people weight the eggs to monitor moisture loss and adjust humidity during incubation. I think their target is 13% weight loss due to the moisture loss. Others candle the eggs and keep track of how the air cell grows. I don’t do either of those, I monitor humidity. They have their targets, the closer to the ideal the better, but even if they are a little high or low they can still get great hatches. You don’t have to be that precise.
One of the problems with just monitoring humidity is that different humidities work best for different ones of us. There are a lot of different reasons for that. Even the same make and model of incubator can have different “sweet spots” for the best humidity let alone different makes and models or whether it is forced air or still air. Height above sea level du rot different air pressures can affect it. The moisture level and temperature of the air going into the incubator can have an effect. Where it is set in the incubation groom can have an effect. I started out higher but through trial and error and opening unhatched eggs I’ve determined my best humidity is around 39 to 40%. During lockdown anything above 65% works quite well. People that open their incubator during lockdown sometimes go with a higher moisture level.
That 65% during the incubation phase sounds high to me but if that’s the recommendation of the incubator manufacturer it’s a reasonable humidity to use, at least the first time. If you do have hatching problems due to high humidity you might try something lower next time. At this point you can’t do anything about it anyway. It’s quite possible that in your circumstances it will work fine. Sure hope so.
To your original question, I’ll ask if you are counting the days right. That’s a very common mistake made on here. An egg does not have a day’s worth of development when it is first put in the incubator. It takes 24 hours for the egg to have a day’s worth of development. So when you are counting you say “1” 24 hours after you put it in. An easy way to check your counting is that the day of the week you put the egg in is the day of the week the 21 days are up. If you started them on a Tuesday the 21 days are up on a Tuesday. To show how critical the exact timing of lockdown is many people miss it by an entire day because of mis-counting and still get great hatches. It’s a good question, it shows you are paying attention and thinking, but if you are off a few hours it really won’t affect your hatch.
Good luck!
