Greetings All!
Where do you get the best hatch rates? With an auto-turner, or without?
Does your auto-turner cause serious temperature spikes? How are you compensating for them?
In my last attempt to hatch out eggs, I used an automatic turner from Little Giant. I had gotten the incubator stable in temps before I put eggs in, with the empty turner running. However, we started experiencing temp. spikes up over 104, and once to 106! Therefore, we lost them all before they hit 10 days in.
In the "rescue batch" just previous, because of the assumed hatch dates, we didn't use the turner, and had a much better hatch-rate. Making a newbie mistake, I went ahead and loaded the incubator with fresh eggs at the same time, was turning those by hand while waiting for the rescues to hatch, and they were developing nicely, with less than a 25% loss. An accident with one of our dogs, (crazy mutt pulled down the bator to get a new-hatched chick, and we lost every egg in there) ended that hatching, so we're trying again.
Bator is a much-used styrofoam one, with the L-shaped thermostat controler, two tiny windows, and finicky as all get-out to get the temps steady!
Thanks,
Kathy
edited for typo's
Where do you get the best hatch rates? With an auto-turner, or without?
Does your auto-turner cause serious temperature spikes? How are you compensating for them?
In my last attempt to hatch out eggs, I used an automatic turner from Little Giant. I had gotten the incubator stable in temps before I put eggs in, with the empty turner running. However, we started experiencing temp. spikes up over 104, and once to 106! Therefore, we lost them all before they hit 10 days in.
In the "rescue batch" just previous, because of the assumed hatch dates, we didn't use the turner, and had a much better hatch-rate. Making a newbie mistake, I went ahead and loaded the incubator with fresh eggs at the same time, was turning those by hand while waiting for the rescues to hatch, and they were developing nicely, with less than a 25% loss. An accident with one of our dogs, (crazy mutt pulled down the bator to get a new-hatched chick, and we lost every egg in there) ended that hatching, so we're trying again.
Bator is a much-used styrofoam one, with the L-shaped thermostat controler, two tiny windows, and finicky as all get-out to get the temps steady!
Thanks,
Kathy
edited for typo's
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