Questions about Nurture Right 360 incubator

[BraveChicken940011]

Hello,
I am brand new to the group and I appreciate you opening this forum up for people to share and ask questions.
We just started our first hatch up two days ago using a Nurture Right 360, and we have many questions. Sadly, as far as I can see there is no way to contact the company about product support, which forces people to turn to YouTube and other avenues like this to get answers to questions. So I apologize for not being able to ask the company directly, but I appreciate any help anyone can give me with these questions.
I am under the understanding that humidity for the eggs should be around 50% during the first 18 days. However, even with the vent fully open, and not a rainy day, today it is reading at 57%. The instructions say not to run the incubator without water, however we live in a very humid climate (Florida), and I hear from various sources that dry incubating increases hatching rates. I would like to try to run the incubator without water to see if it would help the humidity to lower, but worry if running the incubator without water will burn out the motor or something. I don't want to lose these chicks due to (on one side) too high humidity levels, or (on the other side) because I ruined the incubator by running it with no water.
I have more questions, but I want to get an answer to that urgent one before I ask any more. Thanks so much and have a very blessed day!

 

[Pyxis]

You can absolutely run it without water, I do all the time Especially since you're in such a humid climate.

And the humidity doesn't necessarily need to be at 50%. The best humidity to use varies by location. For example, I use 30%. 50% would be too high for my area.

 

[yakitori]

Here’s also a thread on your incubator If you ask some questions there, people subscribed to the thread should get notifications

https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...rture-right-360-incubator-is-amazing.1294466/

 

[docdubz]

Im on my third hatch with my nurture right 360. First time I had 17 out of 22 hatch and the second time I had 14 out of 15 hatch. My take away from using this incubator so far is: it is extremely difficult to get the humidity right. It takes days to figure out how open the vent needs to be and how much water should be in the tray. So far for me filling the tray so that there is about 1/16 of an inch of water and having the vent open about 3/4 of the way open keeps the humidity in the 40-60% range. Yea thats not preferable but the alternative is constantly watching the humidity level until you start going paranoid.

The vent is also extremely finicky... move it a you know what hair and it will completely change the humidity over the course of 20 minutes. Treating the recommended humidity levels as a guide line and not a rule seems to be working well for me so far. Its a perfectly fine incubator but its not good enough to be worrying about precision.