New Egg Incubator

Our first egg incubator seemed to fall short of useful.  It seemed first that it needed to have air moving around it to keep eggs in the middle from getting too hot while those on the edges were not warm enough.  Humidity was never what it needed to be.  I added a fan, and then added an egg turner.  Still could not get a hatch rate better than 30 percent.

I have bought parts to build my own with all the features I want, but have not had time to get it built yet.  So in the mean time I needed to get some eggs hatched so I ordered this one off Amazon.

Here is an affiliate link https://amzn.to/3ZkE0ls

I didn’t want to spend a ton of money but I wanted one that could do a lot  of eggs and included humidity and temperature control, automatic egg turning and battery backup. This one fit most of those needs. It does not control the humidity but does have several useful features that made up for that. Being able to automatically select the mode to switch from chicken to duck eggs seems to be a really nice feature. The day counter is also quite useful.

I have it loaded up with chicken eggs and it is just starting on day 5. 

First observation is that it does not hold 120 eggs, perhaps if I had small hens that laid small eggs it might. For me, I got 100 eggs in it with room for maybe a couple more.

Second observation is that it takes a while for the temperature and humidity to settle in even though I had let it run for more than 24 hours to start. That number of eggs just takes it a while to come up to temperature. Also, it cooled down quite quickly as I was adding the eggs into the bottom tray, install the top tray and add eggs into the top tray. All in all, about 20 minutes for it to come up to temperature, but several hours before I had added enough water to get the humidity up to 60 percent as shown on the display. I have to add water twice a day to maintain the moisture level.