Trying out another new incubator

[cscigu]

For clarity, the tick product is Vectra 3D, not Spectra 3D as I'd been posting. Age....The 3D refers in some way to 3 active ingrediants:
Permethrin, Pyriproxyfen, and Dinotefuran.

 

[SnackMeat]

I have a similar incubator and have a second one coming. My humidity alarm goes off at 39% and below. Which sucks. I have tried disconnecting it and that part of the board is connected to what governs the heat cap, so disconnected the heat started climbing 105+.

A few things:

1. Not great for duck eggs because you need things on the dryer side.

2. Fine for chicken eggs with caveats. Mine, for example, has to be at 103-104 to read 99-100.5. but it has stayed consistent so I don't worry (too much.)

3. Keep the Styrofoam that it came packed in and use that underneath and on top of the dome to keep the temp steady (assuming you don't have heat issues in the house where you would want to have the incubator slightly less insulated.)

4. This incubator doesn't do great to lower temp. I turn off my AC when I am not home and it's 100+ here. It's not abnormal to come back and find the incubator 1-2 degrees higher than expected because it is good at getting to temp but doesn't appear to do anything effectively if it starts to get too warm for external reasons. So I set it one to one and a half degrees cooler when leaving and then bump it back up when I get home.

5. If you wind up in a situation where you have a lot of eggs, this can be used to vertically incubate. Use some medium like husks, and sand, take out the turning trays and the turner contraption from the top. Set your medium (preheating in oven is good, so long as you temp it before adding eggs) then fill bottom of incubator and vertically incubate egg. If in a really bad spot, you can layer eggs. You still have to hand turn (or rather, tilt), but this can really help if you have a bunch of eggs and need the first few days just to see which ones were fertile before downsizing.

6. Where this type of incubator shines is actually as a lockdown hatcher (because high humidity) and brooder for the first few days. The amount of sound blocking the lids do is impressive. That and a towel to block light (you can leave a little gap for the air vent) and I've had chicks be in my bedroom either awake or sleeping and can barely hear their peeps while watching TV in bed. We have also used this type of incubator as a newborn hospital when we had coccidiosis issues with the 4weeks or less chicks.

 

[cscigu]

39%? Ugh.

It sure seems like it was 20 when I unboxed it, hopefully. I'm down to 53, but hoped it would level out around 40 without adding water. I'd guess that's about what it is inside, even with A/C in my neck of the woods.

Its too smart for its own good, and the sleep of the user.

 

[SnackMeat]

I don't know if your's is exactly set at that. Amazon just has a lot of copies floating around and mine (orange colored) is set at 39%, which yes, sucks.

But I need to see at what point when the beeping turns off. Because maybe if you set it dry, it beeps and stops and then you can keep running it dry.

At the moment, I'm running bantam eggs and some other eggs going in to lockdown soon (to be moved to a smaller incubator) so I can't play with the settings but if I get a chance to soon, I'll try to update.

I do think I remember reading people suggesting filling the sensor area with glue (permanent) or taping a wet cotton ball against it. I had messed with it several times trying to puzzle out how to disconnect it without messing with my heat settings, so it felt fragile enough by that point that I didn't want to mess with it more.

There wasn't anything in the directions about dry hatching either, or turning off the beep :/


If it wasn't for the damn beeping at 39% I would say it's a pretty great design. But it is *very* loud and obnoxious and more than once, having been woken up from sleep for something so stupidly pointless as dropping a few percentage points of humidity, I have wanted to test it into the sun. I would definitely test it out beforehand and set it as far from where you normally relax or sleep.

 

[cscigu]

Well, this incubator is definitely set to flip out and beep when you go under 40% humidity....I know how to silence it, but don't think there's and over-ride. I just added some water to keep it quiet.