(The little thing on top that turns to squeeze the tubing is supposed to be tilted.) Then you’ll hear the beeping that signals when the shelves begin to turn to tilt the eggs every two hours. You’ll hear the humidity pump come on when the humidity drops below 43% and turn off when it gets to 44%. Here’s a little video of the incubator in action. We started by setting the humidity for 44% and will increase it to 65% at Day 18. We decided that with this hatch we were not using the dry hatch method, opting to set and monitor the humidity throughout the process. We cheat when Big Brother or Judge Judy is on and pour a little water into the tray to shut the pump down so we can hear the TV. When the humidity gets to the % set, the pump turns off, but it mostly goes all day and all night. When the humidity inside the incubator cabinet drops below the % set, the pump motor turns on and a bit of water is pumped though the tubing onto a sponge inside the incubator, raising the humidity. The thing on the top is an automatic humidity pump with a chamber that holds water. The incubator consists of three shelves with hatching trays. The trays are rotated to slant from one side to the other every two hours in a noisy little procedure preceded by a loud beep. I moved the incubator upstairs into the living room! That’s it on the right. I did what any self-respecting chicken woman would do. It was time to make a change and evaluate exactly what was going on with the incubation and hatch. This can be the direct result of incubating at the improper humidity. I found that I had a lot of eggs that were late quitters, meaning the chick died shortly before hatch. I had used a technique known as “dry hatch” where you leave the humidity alone for Days 1-18 then turn it up for the last three days. I reworked my plans and began hatching other rare breeds but still hatch rates were deplorable. My difficulty hatching Isbar eggs from my flock was particularly frustrating, until I found out that the Isbars in the US were genetically fragile due to inbreeding. Hatch rates have been poor, especially in shipped eggs, although that is expected. Should be the perfect set-up, right? Not so much. There isn’t a window in there so it is easy to candle eggs in the bathroom. When we moved here two years ago, I put the Brinsea in an unused bathroom in the basement where the temperature and humidity are pretty stable. Since we couldn’t even read the directions or settings, we dubbed it “The Chinabator.” I used it a few times but got tired of having multiple incubators, going so I went back to incubating and hatching in the Brinsea. To solve that problem I bought a noisy, cheap tabletop incubator made in China to move the eggs into before hatch. I found early on that eggs incubated quite nicely in it, but didn’t hatch well. From the start, I was less than impressed with the Brinsea cabinet model. I bought a Brinsea 190 cabinet incubator ($1,000.00) about three years ago to replace the small tabletop models I had used.
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