Temperature and humidity?
- Thread starter Josip
- Start date
Here are the sections about this from my article The Beginner's Guide to Incubation.
Temperature
Temperature determines the speed of an embryo’s development, whether it develops at all, and can kill developing embryos if it’s incorrect.
If your temperature is too low, but still high enough to start development, this will cause issues. If it’s just a little too low, it will cause your eggs to hatch later than they should, because it wasn’t high enough for the embryo to develop at a normal rate. If it’s just high enough to start development, but not high enough for normal development to occur, malformations of the embryo will occur, and the embryo likely won’t make it to hatch. If the temperature drops too low entirely, the embryos will get cold and die.
Temperature too high causes similar issues. If it is just a little too high, your embryos will develop a little too fast, and will hatch early. It could also cause your babies to grow too big for their shells, which means they may be unable to properly zip and turn to hatch. Higher than that, and malformations will occur. If your incubator gets too hot, and hits 104 degrees for a long enough time that the inside of the egg also heats up to 104, the embryos will unfortunately be killed.
Now that we've covered why temperature is so important, let's talk about what it should be. This will actually depend on the type of incubator you're using. If your incubator is forced air, meaning it has a fan in it that is blowing the air around to keep the temperature equalized throughout the incubator, you will want your temperature to be 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit/37.5 degrees Celsius. If your incubator is still air, meaning it does not have a fan, you want your temperature to be 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit/38.6 degrees Celsius measured at the top of the eggs.
How to Measure Temperature
Now that you know why temperature is important and what the temperature should be, how do you make sure it's correct? You'll need some thermometers, of course! Even if your incubator has a built in digital temperature control, you will want to check it against accurate thermometers, because it could be wrong, and the displays on some of the cheaper digital incubators are often off.
The best thermometers to use for checking the temperature of your incubator are the digital ones made for reptiles that have a probe that can be placed in the incubator, and aquarium thermometers. The reason that these are the best is because they are usually accurate and they are easy to calibrate to check for accuracy.
Calibrating Your Thermometer
Before you trust that your thermometer is accurate, you will want to calibrate it. Since, as we discussed before, even the temperature being just a little bit off will affect your eggs, it's best to make sure your thermometer is reading correctly, and if not, to know how to adjust for how off it is.
To calibrate your thermometer, fill a glass with ice and leave it out to melt until the glass is half water and half ice. Put your thermometer in the glass, give it a couple minutes to get to temperature, and check it. It should read 32 degrees Fahrenheit. If it does, great! Your thermometer is accurate and you can use it to set the temperature in your incubator.
If it's not right, not to worry, you can still use it. A little math is in order. First, you need to find out how off it is. For example, if it says 33 degrees instead of 32, you know it's reading one degree higher than the temperature actually is. Therefore, when you put it in your incubator, you want it to read one degree higher than the temperature your incubator is supposed to be set at. So in a forced air incubator, you would want it to read 100.5 instead of 99.5, because when it is reading 100.5 degrees, it means the actual temperature in the incubator is 99.5 degrees.
The same is true if it were reading low, so for instance if the thermometer reads 31 degrees instead of 32. In this case, you would want it to read one degree lower than the temperature you need your incubator to be, for the same reasons as above.
The idea behind this method is that the temperature of a solid will remain the same during a phase change. Meaning that as ice turns to water, it will remain at 32 degrees, the temperature at which the phase change occurs, until the change is complete. So while this method might not be as exact as calibrating a thermometer in a laboratory, it should get you pretty close.
Another method you can use is detailed in this article. Though in order to use this method you must already have one thermometer you are sure is accurate.
Humidity
The next very important component of incubation is humidity. The humidity in your incubator determines how much moisture an egg loses over incubation. This is a critical factor in whether an egg will hatch. If it loses too much moisture, the internal membrane can become tight around the chick, which is known as shrink wrapping. The chick is unable to move and thus it cannot hatch and will die. If an egg doesn't lose enough moisture, the chick can try to internally pip and drown due to the excess liquid in the egg. Incorrect humidity is one of the most common causes for death late in incubation.
So how do you make sure an egg is losing enough moisture? The most common way is to monitor the air cells. As the egg loses moisture, the air cell grows in size. Each week it should get a little bigger until it's time to put the egg into 'lockdown' for hatching. Below are some charts that shows how big the air should be each week and on the last day before lockdown.
Candle on the days listed on these charts and compare your eggs' air cells to the size of the ones on the charts. If they are the same size or very close, your humidity is correct. If your air cells are too large, it means your humidity has been too low, and you need to increase it. If they are too small, then your humidity has been too high, and you need to decrease it.
Weighing Your Eggs
Another, more accurate, way to track the moisture loss of an egg is to weigh it. This method is very exact and will tell you definitively if your eggs are losing the proper amount of moisture. I always weigh my more sensitive eggs like goose eggs and peafowl eggs to make sure they are losing the proper amount of moisture. It's also a good idea to weigh your eggs for your first time incubating because it will show you what you need your humidity to be with no guesswork involved. Once you know that, you could go by the air cells in the future if you prefer, but to start with weighing your eggs will allow you to calculate what is the best humidity for incubating for your location, climate, and incubator.
To weigh your eggs to track moisture loss, you will first need a base weight. Right before putting your eggs in the incubator, weigh them using a kitchen scale and write it down. I will actually write the weights right on the eggs with a sharpie pen; no way to lose the weights like you could if you misplace the piece of paper you wrote them down on, and it doesn't hurt the eggs to do this.
This weight is your base weight. An egg needs to lose 11 to 13 percent of its weight by the time it enters lockdown. Shooting for 12% is what I like to do since it's right in the middle. In that case, the formula for determining how much weight an egg should lose is the egg's weight multiplied by .12. So if a chicken egg for example weighed 100 grams, it should lose 12 grams by day 18, when it's time for lockdown. If you weigh the egg every six days to track moisture loss, that means that each time you weigh it, it should lose 4 grams. Or, if you want to weigh daily, that means it should lose roughly .67 grams each day for 18 days, which totals up to 12 grams on day 18. Weighing daily is not necessary, but you could do it if you wanted.
Bantam eggs with weights marked on them
If your eggs are not losing the correct amount of weight, you know you need to adjust humidity. If they lose too much weight, that means they are losing too much moisture and your humidity is too low and needs to be raised. If they are losing too little weight, it means they are losing too little moisture and your humidity needs to be lowered.
So What Should the Humidity Be?
You may notice that no numbers or percents were mentioned in the above explanations. That's because there are no set numbers for what humidity should be. Simply put, humidity is hugely variable and what percent you should have it at in your incubator depends upon where you are located, your local climate, and even your incubator. There's just no way to say for sure what you should keep your humidity at during the first stage of incubation (lockdown is a little different, and that will be discussed later). For the first stage of incubation, which would be the first 18 days for chicks and the first 25 days for ducklings, geese, turkeys, etc, you're just going to have to find out what will work best for you using the methods described above.
However, you will want to be monitoring what percent your humidity is at so you can know when it rises and when it lowers, and so that after getting the best humidity for yourself figured out you can just set it to that in your incubator going forward. To measure humidity, a hygrometer must be used. The best hygrometer I have found is a digital one by AcuRite, as pictured below.
Adjusting Humidity
It's very likely that as you're getting started with incubating, you're going to need to make adjustments to the humidity in your incubator, and you will definitely need to make adjustments for lockdown. Well, how do you do that? If it's too low, how do you get it to rise? If it's too high, how do you lower it?
The answer is simple: adjust the surface area of the water. Humidity is determined by how much surface area of water there is in an incubator, not the amount of water. For example, one incubator has a big jug of water in it that holds a quart of water. The opening of the jug is 3 inches square. A second incubator has a damp paper towel on the bottom that only holds one cup of water. The paper towel covers 10 square inches of the incubator. Even though the first incubator has more water in it, the second incubator will have a higher humidity.
Most incubators have water troughs built in that you can add water to for controlling humidity. If you add water to the troughs and you find it's not getting high enough, which can definitely be a concern during lockdown, you can add baby food jars or mason jars full of water with paper towels or sponges sticking out of them to wick water up and add even more surface area. Or just place a damp sponge or paper towel in the incubator (not touching the eggs).
If you add water to your troughs and the humidity is too high, then you can instead just add a folded up damp paper towel and fold it smaller until the surface area is small enough that the humidity is where you need it to be.
Or, if you are in a humid climate or your humidity just naturally stays high enough as is, you may not need to add any water at all for the first stage of incubation, which is referred to as dry hatching. However, dry hatching doesn't mean you never add water. You can see this thread for more details about that. If dry hatching is not appropriate for your area, then you will need to add water.
Calibrating Your Hygrometer
In order to make sure your hygrometer is reading correctly, you will want to calibrate it. This is easy to do via the "salt test". Take a teaspoon of salt and put it in a bottle cap or a small cup and add a few drops of water to dampen it. Take this and your hygrometer and put them inside a sealable see-through container. A Ziploc bag can work as long as it seals well. Let it sit for six hours and then check what the reading on your hygrometer is. The hygrometer should read 75%. If it doesn't, you'll know it's off, how much it's off, and you can calculate what the real humidity is by how off it is.
Temperature
Temperature determines the speed of an embryo’s development, whether it develops at all, and can kill developing embryos if it’s incorrect.
If your temperature is too low, but still high enough to start development, this will cause issues. If it’s just a little too low, it will cause your eggs to hatch later than they should, because it wasn’t high enough for the embryo to develop at a normal rate. If it’s just high enough to start development, but not high enough for normal development to occur, malformations of the embryo will occur, and the embryo likely won’t make it to hatch. If the temperature drops too low entirely, the embryos will get cold and die.
Temperature too high causes similar issues. If it is just a little too high, your embryos will develop a little too fast, and will hatch early. It could also cause your babies to grow too big for their shells, which means they may be unable to properly zip and turn to hatch. Higher than that, and malformations will occur. If your incubator gets too hot, and hits 104 degrees for a long enough time that the inside of the egg also heats up to 104, the embryos will unfortunately be killed.
Now that we've covered why temperature is so important, let's talk about what it should be. This will actually depend on the type of incubator you're using. If your incubator is forced air, meaning it has a fan in it that is blowing the air around to keep the temperature equalized throughout the incubator, you will want your temperature to be 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit/37.5 degrees Celsius. If your incubator is still air, meaning it does not have a fan, you want your temperature to be 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit/38.6 degrees Celsius measured at the top of the eggs.
How to Measure Temperature
Now that you know why temperature is important and what the temperature should be, how do you make sure it's correct? You'll need some thermometers, of course! Even if your incubator has a built in digital temperature control, you will want to check it against accurate thermometers, because it could be wrong, and the displays on some of the cheaper digital incubators are often off.
The best thermometers to use for checking the temperature of your incubator are the digital ones made for reptiles that have a probe that can be placed in the incubator, and aquarium thermometers. The reason that these are the best is because they are usually accurate and they are easy to calibrate to check for accuracy.
Calibrating Your Thermometer
Before you trust that your thermometer is accurate, you will want to calibrate it. Since, as we discussed before, even the temperature being just a little bit off will affect your eggs, it's best to make sure your thermometer is reading correctly, and if not, to know how to adjust for how off it is.
To calibrate your thermometer, fill a glass with ice and leave it out to melt until the glass is half water and half ice. Put your thermometer in the glass, give it a couple minutes to get to temperature, and check it. It should read 32 degrees Fahrenheit. If it does, great! Your thermometer is accurate and you can use it to set the temperature in your incubator.
If it's not right, not to worry, you can still use it. A little math is in order. First, you need to find out how off it is. For example, if it says 33 degrees instead of 32, you know it's reading one degree higher than the temperature actually is. Therefore, when you put it in your incubator, you want it to read one degree higher than the temperature your incubator is supposed to be set at. So in a forced air incubator, you would want it to read 100.5 instead of 99.5, because when it is reading 100.5 degrees, it means the actual temperature in the incubator is 99.5 degrees.
The same is true if it were reading low, so for instance if the thermometer reads 31 degrees instead of 32. In this case, you would want it to read one degree lower than the temperature you need your incubator to be, for the same reasons as above.
The idea behind this method is that the temperature of a solid will remain the same during a phase change. Meaning that as ice turns to water, it will remain at 32 degrees, the temperature at which the phase change occurs, until the change is complete. So while this method might not be as exact as calibrating a thermometer in a laboratory, it should get you pretty close.
Another method you can use is detailed in this article. Though in order to use this method you must already have one thermometer you are sure is accurate.
Humidity
The next very important component of incubation is humidity. The humidity in your incubator determines how much moisture an egg loses over incubation. This is a critical factor in whether an egg will hatch. If it loses too much moisture, the internal membrane can become tight around the chick, which is known as shrink wrapping. The chick is unable to move and thus it cannot hatch and will die. If an egg doesn't lose enough moisture, the chick can try to internally pip and drown due to the excess liquid in the egg. Incorrect humidity is one of the most common causes for death late in incubation.
So how do you make sure an egg is losing enough moisture? The most common way is to monitor the air cells. As the egg loses moisture, the air cell grows in size. Each week it should get a little bigger until it's time to put the egg into 'lockdown' for hatching. Below are some charts that shows how big the air should be each week and on the last day before lockdown.
Candle on the days listed on these charts and compare your eggs' air cells to the size of the ones on the charts. If they are the same size or very close, your humidity is correct. If your air cells are too large, it means your humidity has been too low, and you need to increase it. If they are too small, then your humidity has been too high, and you need to decrease it.
Weighing Your Eggs
Another, more accurate, way to track the moisture loss of an egg is to weigh it. This method is very exact and will tell you definitively if your eggs are losing the proper amount of moisture. I always weigh my more sensitive eggs like goose eggs and peafowl eggs to make sure they are losing the proper amount of moisture. It's also a good idea to weigh your eggs for your first time incubating because it will show you what you need your humidity to be with no guesswork involved. Once you know that, you could go by the air cells in the future if you prefer, but to start with weighing your eggs will allow you to calculate what is the best humidity for incubating for your location, climate, and incubator.
To weigh your eggs to track moisture loss, you will first need a base weight. Right before putting your eggs in the incubator, weigh them using a kitchen scale and write it down. I will actually write the weights right on the eggs with a sharpie pen; no way to lose the weights like you could if you misplace the piece of paper you wrote them down on, and it doesn't hurt the eggs to do this.
This weight is your base weight. An egg needs to lose 11 to 13 percent of its weight by the time it enters lockdown. Shooting for 12% is what I like to do since it's right in the middle. In that case, the formula for determining how much weight an egg should lose is the egg's weight multiplied by .12. So if a chicken egg for example weighed 100 grams, it should lose 12 grams by day 18, when it's time for lockdown. If you weigh the egg every six days to track moisture loss, that means that each time you weigh it, it should lose 4 grams. Or, if you want to weigh daily, that means it should lose roughly .67 grams each day for 18 days, which totals up to 12 grams on day 18. Weighing daily is not necessary, but you could do it if you wanted.
Bantam eggs with weights marked on them
If your eggs are not losing the correct amount of weight, you know you need to adjust humidity. If they lose too much weight, that means they are losing too much moisture and your humidity is too low and needs to be raised. If they are losing too little weight, it means they are losing too little moisture and your humidity needs to be lowered.
So What Should the Humidity Be?
You may notice that no numbers or percents were mentioned in the above explanations. That's because there are no set numbers for what humidity should be. Simply put, humidity is hugely variable and what percent you should have it at in your incubator depends upon where you are located, your local climate, and even your incubator. There's just no way to say for sure what you should keep your humidity at during the first stage of incubation (lockdown is a little different, and that will be discussed later). For the first stage of incubation, which would be the first 18 days for chicks and the first 25 days for ducklings, geese, turkeys, etc, you're just going to have to find out what will work best for you using the methods described above.
However, you will want to be monitoring what percent your humidity is at so you can know when it rises and when it lowers, and so that after getting the best humidity for yourself figured out you can just set it to that in your incubator going forward. To measure humidity, a hygrometer must be used. The best hygrometer I have found is a digital one by AcuRite, as pictured below.
Adjusting Humidity
It's very likely that as you're getting started with incubating, you're going to need to make adjustments to the humidity in your incubator, and you will definitely need to make adjustments for lockdown. Well, how do you do that? If it's too low, how do you get it to rise? If it's too high, how do you lower it?
The answer is simple: adjust the surface area of the water. Humidity is determined by how much surface area of water there is in an incubator, not the amount of water. For example, one incubator has a big jug of water in it that holds a quart of water. The opening of the jug is 3 inches square. A second incubator has a damp paper towel on the bottom that only holds one cup of water. The paper towel covers 10 square inches of the incubator. Even though the first incubator has more water in it, the second incubator will have a higher humidity.
Most incubators have water troughs built in that you can add water to for controlling humidity. If you add water to the troughs and you find it's not getting high enough, which can definitely be a concern during lockdown, you can add baby food jars or mason jars full of water with paper towels or sponges sticking out of them to wick water up and add even more surface area. Or just place a damp sponge or paper towel in the incubator (not touching the eggs).
If you add water to your troughs and the humidity is too high, then you can instead just add a folded up damp paper towel and fold it smaller until the surface area is small enough that the humidity is where you need it to be.
Or, if you are in a humid climate or your humidity just naturally stays high enough as is, you may not need to add any water at all for the first stage of incubation, which is referred to as dry hatching. However, dry hatching doesn't mean you never add water. You can see this thread for more details about that. If dry hatching is not appropriate for your area, then you will need to add water.
Calibrating Your Hygrometer
In order to make sure your hygrometer is reading correctly, you will want to calibrate it. This is easy to do via the "salt test". Take a teaspoon of salt and put it in a bottle cap or a small cup and add a few drops of water to dampen it. Take this and your hygrometer and put them inside a sealable see-through container. A Ziploc bag can work as long as it seals well. Let it sit for six hours and then check what the reading on your hygrometer is. The hygrometer should read 75%. If it doesn't, you'll know it's off, how much it's off, and you can calculate what the real humidity is by how off it is.
Last edited:
Mellowmalt
Songster
I agree with the above answer apart from calibrating your thermometer using ice.
It is such an inaccurate way I don't know why it keeps getting used as a reference.
It would be like using an oven, sticking it to 50 degrees and sticking your thermometer in there.
Or another way to put it is that you would just be adding more guesswork, when you mix water together with Ice the resulting temperature will most often not be exactly 0 degrees C.
Ice can have a temperature of -100C to 0 C. Water can range from 5 C to 30 degrees C.
Most fridges operate at -18 C and most water kept at room temperature will be 20C.
Stick them together and in theory you will have 1 degrees C but when will it be 1 degrees C? Shortly after it is 1 degrees C it will rise to 1.1degrees and 10 minutes later it will be at 2 degrees C. But wait aren't we calibrating to 0 degrees C?
Yes we are.
So what if the freezer is running at -24 C, what if my room temp is at 30 degrees C? You get the picture.
It would be like trying to measure out the ingredients to make a cake using ones hands as measuring devices and the aim is to increase their accuracy not rely on guesswork instead.
This is the only reliable method that should be used :
https://www.backyardchickens.com/ar...incubator-thermometers-and-hygrometers.73634/
Ok now now on to my answer.
Temperatures can vary and fluctuate in an incubator. The aim is to keep them as steady as possible but heat exchange is taking place all the time, it will be slightly hotter near the heating element and slightly cooler the furthest away.
Overheating can be more damaging than underheating slightly but there lies a problem, what is slightly in terms of temperature??
So lets go a bit more accurate. The safe range for chicken eggs in a forced air incubator is anywhere from 36.7 degrees C to 38.3 degrees C.
Always try to aim for the sweet spot of 37,4 or 37.5 degrees C if possible and avoid going too much over or under this.
In the first week the eggs can tolerate slightly warmer, in the final week the eggs might even benefit from going 0.2 degrees lower than the ideal because they are producing a tiny bit of body heat already.
So in practical terms I aim for 37.5-37.9 in first week
37.4-37.5 in second week
37.2-37.3 in third week
Humidity should be between 45-55% in the first 3 weeks but humidity is far more variable than temperature should be. To determine the right humidity the air cell size should be checked by candling the eggs throughout incubation and humidity should be adjusted accordingly, if an egg is losing too much moisture the air cells will become too big too soon and the humidity should b increased slightly to slow down the rate of transpiration and put the egg development back on track again and vice versa.
So there is no set humidity, it will depend on your ambient temp and humidity, the type of incubator you use and and the eggs your are hatching (number of eggs in an incubator will make a difference too)
In a crowded incubator with lots of transpiring eggs you might get away with a slightly lower humidity and in a drafty incubator with few eggs you might have to stay on the high end for humidity.
You might have read about dry incubation and how some people swear by it. Just be careful dry incubating and be aware it is not something that should ever be attempted on your first try, certainly not without checking air cell development while doing so.
Some incubators can be run dry and have the optimal humidity but most hobby (smller incubators) will need to have some form of added moisture - that is how they have been designed so unless you are sure your incubator runs well without added moisture always aim for a bit of added moisture in the incubator. Never so much as to start condensation on the sides and never too low that the air cells become too big. Otherwise humidity is far less important than temperature.
You hear problems associated with humidity like "drowning in the shell" and "shrinkwrapped" chicks but humidity is blamed far too often when the most likely reason for hatching problems is wrong temperatures - not humidity.
When there is excessive fluid in the egg at hatch time it is easy to assume humidity was running high but more likely is that the embryo did not develop at the right rate thus leaving an underdeveloped chick in excess fluid and the chick won't make it.
The aim is for the chick to absorb all the fluid by hatch day but it should have some fluid left or it will be very dry hatching. This can be more problematic than too wet.
But people do always like to throw the drowning chick phenomena into the equation arguing that humidity should never be too high either.
Whatever the case if the egg is too dry come hatch time due to too fast development or too low humidity whichever you want to blame then the chick will have difficulty hatching.
Some will argue a shrinkwrapped chicks will have too hard a time pecking through the membrane - considering they have to peck through a shell this is less likely. What is more likely is that they get "stuck" to the dry membrane thus preventing them turning in the egg and this prevents them hatching without help.
So whatever the reason for a problematic hatch, higher temps and lower humidity will generally be more of a problem than slighty lower temps and higher humidity.
If a chick has difficulty hatching the membrane will generally dry as a chick should pip and hatch in a few hours, if it struggles, the membrane will dry presenting further complications of "shrinkwrapping"
It is such an inaccurate way I don't know why it keeps getting used as a reference.
It would be like using an oven, sticking it to 50 degrees and sticking your thermometer in there.
Or another way to put it is that you would just be adding more guesswork, when you mix water together with Ice the resulting temperature will most often not be exactly 0 degrees C.
Ice can have a temperature of -100C to 0 C. Water can range from 5 C to 30 degrees C.
Most fridges operate at -18 C and most water kept at room temperature will be 20C.
Stick them together and in theory you will have 1 degrees C but when will it be 1 degrees C? Shortly after it is 1 degrees C it will rise to 1.1degrees and 10 minutes later it will be at 2 degrees C. But wait aren't we calibrating to 0 degrees C?
Yes we are.
So what if the freezer is running at -24 C, what if my room temp is at 30 degrees C? You get the picture.
It would be like trying to measure out the ingredients to make a cake using ones hands as measuring devices and the aim is to increase their accuracy not rely on guesswork instead.
This is the only reliable method that should be used :
https://www.backyardchickens.com/ar...incubator-thermometers-and-hygrometers.73634/
Ok now now on to my answer.
Temperatures can vary and fluctuate in an incubator. The aim is to keep them as steady as possible but heat exchange is taking place all the time, it will be slightly hotter near the heating element and slightly cooler the furthest away.
Overheating can be more damaging than underheating slightly but there lies a problem, what is slightly in terms of temperature??
So lets go a bit more accurate. The safe range for chicken eggs in a forced air incubator is anywhere from 36.7 degrees C to 38.3 degrees C.
Always try to aim for the sweet spot of 37,4 or 37.5 degrees C if possible and avoid going too much over or under this.
In the first week the eggs can tolerate slightly warmer, in the final week the eggs might even benefit from going 0.2 degrees lower than the ideal because they are producing a tiny bit of body heat already.
So in practical terms I aim for 37.5-37.9 in first week
37.4-37.5 in second week
37.2-37.3 in third week
Humidity should be between 45-55% in the first 3 weeks but humidity is far more variable than temperature should be. To determine the right humidity the air cell size should be checked by candling the eggs throughout incubation and humidity should be adjusted accordingly, if an egg is losing too much moisture the air cells will become too big too soon and the humidity should b increased slightly to slow down the rate of transpiration and put the egg development back on track again and vice versa.
So there is no set humidity, it will depend on your ambient temp and humidity, the type of incubator you use and and the eggs your are hatching (number of eggs in an incubator will make a difference too)
In a crowded incubator with lots of transpiring eggs you might get away with a slightly lower humidity and in a drafty incubator with few eggs you might have to stay on the high end for humidity.
You might have read about dry incubation and how some people swear by it. Just be careful dry incubating and be aware it is not something that should ever be attempted on your first try, certainly not without checking air cell development while doing so.
Some incubators can be run dry and have the optimal humidity but most hobby (smller incubators) will need to have some form of added moisture - that is how they have been designed so unless you are sure your incubator runs well without added moisture always aim for a bit of added moisture in the incubator. Never so much as to start condensation on the sides and never too low that the air cells become too big. Otherwise humidity is far less important than temperature.
You hear problems associated with humidity like "drowning in the shell" and "shrinkwrapped" chicks but humidity is blamed far too often when the most likely reason for hatching problems is wrong temperatures - not humidity.
When there is excessive fluid in the egg at hatch time it is easy to assume humidity was running high but more likely is that the embryo did not develop at the right rate thus leaving an underdeveloped chick in excess fluid and the chick won't make it.
The aim is for the chick to absorb all the fluid by hatch day but it should have some fluid left or it will be very dry hatching. This can be more problematic than too wet.
But people do always like to throw the drowning chick phenomena into the equation arguing that humidity should never be too high either.
Whatever the case if the egg is too dry come hatch time due to too fast development or too low humidity whichever you want to blame then the chick will have difficulty hatching.
Some will argue a shrinkwrapped chicks will have too hard a time pecking through the membrane - considering they have to peck through a shell this is less likely. What is more likely is that they get "stuck" to the dry membrane thus preventing them turning in the egg and this prevents them hatching without help.
So whatever the reason for a problematic hatch, higher temps and lower humidity will generally be more of a problem than slighty lower temps and higher humidity.
If a chick has difficulty hatching the membrane will generally dry as a chick should pip and hatch in a few hours, if it struggles, the membrane will dry presenting further complications of "shrinkwrapping"
Last edited:
@Pyxis please check your messages -thanks!
The idea behind the ice method is that the temperature of a solid will remain the same during a phase change. Meaning that as ice turns to water, it will remain at 32 degrees, the temperature at which the phase change occurs, until the change is complete. So, you put ice out, wait for it to melt, and when half is water and half is ice, the mixture is very likely just about 32 F. So while this method isn't as exact as calibrating a thermometer in a laboratory or against a known accurate thermometer, it should get you pretty close.
But yes, if you have a thermometer that was lab calibrated and you already know it's the exact right temperature, comparing your other thermometers against it is more accurate, for sure.
Depends on the type of incubator. Warm air rises. If you have a still air incubator (one without a fan) where you take the temperature is very important. In a still air incubator the recommended temperature is 101.5 Fahrenheit (38.6 C) taken at the top of the eggs.
In a forced air incubator (one with a fan) the recommendation is 99.5 F (37.5 C) taken anywhere in the incubator. If the fan is working properly it should keep the air stirred up so warm air rising is not an issue.
This is a lot harder to answer. There is no perfect humidity that is best for every incubator. There are a lot of different variables that affect this. Whether it is a still air or forced air. Temperature and humidity of the air in the room. Height above sea level. The list goes on and on, so many variables. What works well for one may not be great for another. Some people do quite well at 30% humidity during incubation, some do well at 50%. Some do OK at 60% during lockdown, some need the humidity higher.
Does your incubator come with instructions? My suggestion is to follow their instructions as closely as you can during your first incubation attempt and see how you do. Crack open any unhatched eggs and see if you see something that suggests you might need to increase or decrease the humidity.
My incubator suggested filling two certain reservoirs in the base with water, they did not give a target humidity. I kept good records and after some trial and error I determined my best spot was about 40% humidity. I still got a fairly good hatch using their recommendation but I improved the results a little with my trial and error method.
Good luck!
Similar threads
New posts New threads Active threads
-
Latest threads
-
Silkie chicks - silver and gold based, will they both turn white?
- Started by sccoastchicks
- Replies: 0
-
-
-
-
-
-
Threads with more replies in the last 15 days
-
-
-
24 hour old chick with legs and feet issue.- Started by Beckys Birds
- Replies: 111
-
-
Need advice for the best vines and plants for in a chicken run!- Started by ChickenShepherd_6116
- Replies: 98
-
