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Still air incubator5/29/2023 Using wood glue and 1-inch nails, create a five-sided cube, leaving the top open. 12-by-8-inch disposable aluminum baking pan.5-by-7-inch piece of glass or plastic (from a picture frame).electric water heater thermostat switch.25½-by-13-by-16-inch plastic foam cooler.1 16½-by-26¼-inch plywood piece, 1⁄2-inch thick (outer case base).2 11-by-27¼-inch plywood pieces, 1⁄2-inch thick (outer case long sides).2 11-by-16½-inch plywood pieces, 1⁄2-inch thick (outer case short sides).During the last three days, you should not disturb your eggs at all-no turning. To help keep track, use a pencil to mark an X on one side and an O on the other to help you remember which side is which. If you’re not getting enough humidity, you can try adding a sponge to the pan this should help bring more moisture into the environment.įor the first 18 days, your eggs must be turned over two or three times per day. To control the humidity, adjust the amount of water in the baking pan. If your incubator get too dry, your eggs may not hatch. Your eggs need a humidity of 50 to 55 percent for first 18 days, and 65 percent or more for the last three. (An incubator with a fan is called a forced-air incubator.) Because of this, you should aim for a higher temperature of 101 degrees F. Here, we’re building a simple still-air incubator, meaning it has no fan to circulate the air. The goal of an incubator is to maintain a temperature of 97 to 101 degrees F at all times. Feel free to modify these ideas to incorporate the parts you already have or can easily obtain. However, there are many variations that can be just as successful. Our incubator design uses a plastic foam cooler to insulate the eggs and keep the heat from the light bulb from escaping, and we built an outer case from 1⁄2-inch plywood to protect the foam. While store-bought incubators are convenient and offer additional features, building your own homemade incubator can yield excellent results. If you don’t already keep a flock, obtain some fertile eggs from a fellow chicken keeper or have fertile eggs shipped from a hatchery that offers a specific breed you’re interested in. It can be a fun project for yourself or to do with your kids. Then stick them in the incubator and compare the difference to your current digital thermometer.If you’ve been raising chickens for awhile, you might be considering hatching chicks in an incubator. If you cannot calibrate your digital thermometer, run to walmart and buy multiple of those glass aquarium thermometers and calibrate them. Thermometers are one story, but I've never had a spot-on accurate hygrometer. Your instruments could be reading completely wrong. Have you calibrated both thermometer and hygrometer?Īlways calibrate. Don't open the incubator until there's no more pips. It's something you have to find out yourself.Īfter the chicks hatch they do not need humidity, but the other eggs do. Which is why you don't see an exact answer here. Shipped eggs often have funny shaped air sacs.ĭifferent people in different climates with different eggs and incubators have luck with different humidity levels. Remember that you're comparing the amount of air vs the amount of chick, the shape of the air sac doesn't matter, as long as it's still connected to the fat end of the egg. You can candle on days 7,14 & 18 and compare your egg's air sacs to this chart. Some people don't go through the 'trouble' of weighing the eggs, and instead compare air sacs. If the humidity is lower, it will loose the weight faster. If the humidity is higher, the egg will loose the weight slower. Weigh a few times during incubation and see how fast or slow the eggs are losing the weight, and +/- humidity accordingly to the rate of weight loss. Subtract the 13%, and write that down as the goal. So, some people weigh their eggs before incubation, write down that weight. They do this by evaporating moisture through the egg shell, and replacing it with air in the air sac. From the beginning of incubation to lockdown, the egg needs to loose about 13% of it's starting weight. The whole idea, is, eggs need to lose a certain amount of moisture during incubation. Humidity is a bit difficult to talk about. In a still air incubator, the goal is to get the core of the eggs as close to 99.5F as possible, but because heat rises, you want the temperature to read 100-101 from the top of eggs.
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