What went wrong?

[Sphinx]

I have a brinsea mini advance. The automatic turner on it is broken, and I'd had it ready to go back for repairs. But then all of my hens were killed. I decided to attempt to hatch some of their last eggs before sending the incubator back.

I placed 7 eggs in the incubator. They had been refrigerated for an undetermined time (I hadn't been keeping track or turning them because they were food), but it was probably less than a week. I hand turned them every 4 hours or so until lockdown. I always washed my hands prior to handling the eggs.

When I candled at day 7, I saw great veining in 5. The other two were so dark that I couldn't see much, but I was pretty sure I saw a couple veins.

Fast forward to today- day 22. Not a single on hatched, and I could tell by candling that they weren't developed to the point of hatching, so I took them out.

When I opened them up, I found that they all had started to develop, but all had died around days 8-10.

I followed manufacturer's instructions as far as humidity and had the temp set at 99.5. I don't have an independent hygrometer or thermometer, I relied on Brinsea's equipment.

Could this be a result of them being refrigerated, or something else? I'd been kind of emotionally invested in these hatching, so I'm disappointed they didn't turn out.

 

[justbugged]

It sounds more like something went wrong on day 10 with the incubator. Is it possible that the power went out for a little bit? Or if the incubator has been not working properly that the temperature may have spiked. It's really hard to say on way or another, because there are many things that can go wrong even without having refrigerated the eggs.

There are a group of BYC members that have hatched chicks from fertile store bought eggs. So refrigeration and not turning the eggs before starting the incubation process.

 

[Sphinx]

Nope, no power outages. Around day 7 or so, I did move the incubator from my basement to my living room- I found the room I'd been keeping it in was pretty cold, and the incubator seemed to struggle to keep the heat up. So, I moved it upstairs, so I guess that would be considered an outage, except it only took about 45 seconds, and the temp immediately went back up. Plus, a day or so after the move, I did candle and saw movement in one egg.

I'm sending the incubator back to Brinsea today to get the automatic turner fixed. I think I'll include a note describing the details of this incubation, and ask them to look over everything else and make sure that it's functioning correctly.