What did we do wrong? Help!

[vwgurl2]

We have 9 eggs in an incubator and we are on day 23 with no pipping or scratching. We have a Little Giant still air incubator and a digital incubator thermometer hydrometer. Through out the last 23 days our temps were no lower than 99 and no higher than about 101. Humidity ranged from about 40-55 % until we locked down at day 18 at which we kept the humidity at around 60. We had candled them (can't remember which day) and all but one had a mass and vein-looking things. We took that one out after that. It appears we did everything right but I would think that we should be hearing something!! Any ideas what went wrong? Were our temps not right? We put a second thermoter in the incubator just to see what it read and it was about 10 degrees lower than our digital thermometer. Anything information would be helpful!! Thanks!!!

 

[NovaAman]

When you candle now, do you see any movement in the air cell? IF the temps were lower, they could take a few days longer. I had a broody hen who I was sure lost every egg. They all hatched on days 24-25... Just saying...

 

[vwgurl2]

My husband candled again tonight and only 2 looked like there was a mass. He put them back in the incubator for another day or two just in case.

 

[HEChicken]

Digital thermometers are notoriously inaccurate - I would recommend switching to an analog, and find a way to calibrate it before you try again. My method for "calibrating" was a little unorthodox but worked. I went to Walmart and found a little thermometer that sells for $1. They had 20 of them on the rack. Being an analog, I could see right through the packaging what temperature it was reading. 14 of them read 75, so I concluded that Walmart had their thermostat set to 75. I bought one of those, brought it home and set it on my house thermostat. A few hours later it read the same temp as my thermostat.

Since I switched to using that thermometer, I went from having 0% hatches to 100% on my last hatch.

 

[vwgurl2]

I'm begining to wonder if when we candled them we set them down wrong or maybe we moved them a little too much. Would that have messed up the incubation? I have read some other posts from ppl and it doesn't really seem like we did anything too wrong.

 

[cmfarm]

I would think it has to do with the temperature. I bet it was off with such a huge variation in the 2 thermometers.

 

[vwgurl2]

Here is an update.... We just cracked them open and 4 out of the 9 had chicks in them that were around day 16 or 17. 2 more had earlier embryos possibly day 10 or so. 1 was infertile and the other 2 were early deaths. So something went wrong after lockdown. Our next attempt we are going to keep a diary of temps and humidity to make sure this does not happen again. This has been very disappointing and any additional tips would be helpful! Thanks