To dry hatch or to not?

[remicuties]

I have a NR 360 and each time I’ve done chicken eggs it’s always been adding water, I live in a humid area and wondered if dry hatching was a safe option or not, I always need refreshed on what the best humidity level is on my incubator and right now it was 37% I just set these eggs on 8/5 I hope that it wasn’t too low and that I killed them

I added a bit of water now it’s 42% I hope that still isn’t too low.

I need a refresher course lol

 

[SnackMeat]

I think it's worth trying both ways and it depends on the eggs. I started off dry and nuked some bantam eggs, so for me, bantams are a no. Regular chicken eggs I'm iffy on-- like it is probably fine but humidity is also fine.

Where dry hatching is a must is when it comes to duck eggs.


Good God the amount of duck eggs that didn't lose enough weight because I was using my failures with chicken eggs and applying them to duck eggs.


Highly recommend weighing your eggs before starting, and then weekly. Mark them in grams and then do the math to try to hit 2.8% or so per week. If you lose too much weight or not enough, lean in the other direction regarding humid or dry.

 

[kattabelly]

I live in a humid area and generally dry incubate up until the last few days, when I'll add water because hatching chicks don't seem to up the humidity enough themselves (it's a forced air incubator, which might be a factor there). Generally the incubator claims to sit at around 40% humidity but I don't use a separate hygrometer to double check that the way I do for temperature - I go off how the air cell looks, or sometimes egg weight if I can be bothered doing that. If I think they're losing a bit too much at two weeks, I'll just bump up the humidity a few days earlier - when this has happened it's been with eggs that were on the smaller side to begin with, or looked quite porous when I candled them before setting.