I need to go back to hatching 101.
I need to get a few reliable humidity gauges for the incubators that don't have them. Or for that matter even the ones that do just to double check.
I also need to go back to proper storing eggs before setting. I always kept them in my room which has AC all summer. I hand turn them three times a day but decided to store them in my Little Giant eggturners.
That eliminates worrying about turning them. Surely it turning them every couple hours isn't too much? I think what the problem might be is that I don't want to overload the circuit in my room and besides by normal stuff I may have a few incubators plugged in at all times. I moved the Turners and egg storing to the laundry room and it doesn't have AC. That room may be too hot to be good for them. And I have no idea the humidity there either. I need to get a thermometer with the humidity gauge and put on the wall in that room just so I can see what's going on. Would be a good idea to do the same for my room.
I just don't have luck with knowing which ones are actually accurate. I think that's a couple things to start with. Locked down for my next back is tomorrow. When I candle I may draw the lines around the air cell take a look at them to see if it looks like they're too big or too small. I never worried about humidity much and dry hatch until lockdown. I may have to change my ways or at least monitored some during storage and early incubating just to make sure that ain't the problem.
You would think I would have this incubating all figured out by now but this year has been a struggle like no other.
I understand how frustrating that is, and despite hatching for literally over 20 years, I had a horrible time hatching turkey eggs when I first started out with them. Like no joke, I was getting about a 0-10% hatch rates with my first few sets. It was not nutritional, the birds were prime breeding age, they were not closely related and some completely unrelated, and fertility was 90-100% so the toms were doing their jobs. It forced me to nail everything down to a science in order to get poults to hatch. I had to buy new hygrometers (I love Govees that you can use to monitor temp/humidity with your phone). That is when I started doing a modified dry incubation and it has been a game changer, not just with turkey eggs but also chicken eggs.
But sometimes, no matter what you do, some breeds/varieties just donāt hatch well. We set a few clutches of eggs from a certain pair of birds this year and ZERO of those eggs hatched. It is due to a number of reasons, mainly the hen isnāt a spring chicken anymore and it getting up in years, and the line has just been kept pure and uninfused with fresh blood for so long, we had to infuse it with another line to try to salvage it. That may not be your case though if your birds arenāt older or the gene pool is bigger.
I store eggs in a spare turner as I collect them for the incubator so you canāt turn them too much I donāt think. And I think the sportsman turns every hour. But if the eggs are developing all the way to lockdown and then failing to hatch, it is likely a genetics issue at play or humidity. Usually too high of humidity will affect my hatch rates, and as long as you donāt incubate below 20% humidity, too low of humidity is probably not the issue. If it has been humid there, high ambient humidity may be causing the humidity in the incubators to be too high, even when running them dry. I would monitor the humidity in the rooms and in the incubators with some Govees. I get mine on
Amazon. I have heard of people having to run a dehumidifier in the room with the incubator because their ambient humidity is high, so with as much rain as you have had, that could be possible.
