Reviews by Peep_Show

Hi. My name is Peep_Show and I am a hatchaholic.....

Upon getting a Brinsea with all the bells and whistles, I started ordering eggs.. Lots of eggs. And, thanks to assorted variables, they all started arriving at staggered times instead of the well-orchestrated schedule I thought I had implemented. It became readily apparent that although the Brinsea could incubate, I was going to run into problems at lockdown with hatching on widely different days. That and the fact that the Brinsea doesn't have a lot of chick room created the decision to get a second incubator for hatching. The recommendation from other hatchaholics on BYC was the Hova-Bator 1588.

PROS:
I purchased this unit from Fleming and it arrived in fairly short order. The first plus right out of the box was that the incubator lid and bottom stacks into itself for easy, compact storage. The interior of the incubator appears deep and cavernous thanks to its high top and rounded corners and almost makes you wish there was an interior light. The viewing window is quite large, encompassing nearly the whole top of the incubator. There's plenty of room for turners and thermometers. Just one vent hole in the top, red plug included. If you have an auto-turner, the cord fits snugly out of a corner without a big cord gap space to let in cold air.

Reading the instruction manual first (always a good idea), setup was easy. I put two Accu-Rite thermometer/hygrometer units inside and found the temp to be right spot on. The humidity gage, though, was off a good 5-6%. Following the directions, calibration was easy to do and the humidity now holds true within 1% of what the Accu-Rites read. The monitor is backlit and easy to read and gives the (pre)Set temperature (100.00), the interior temperature and the humidity. A light flashes when the incubator is close to the optimal temp.

The unit comes with a removable screen floor that fits over and clips onto a plastic tray which contains water channels to fill to provide humidity. I like the plastic insert as it helps keep the Styrofoam cleaner. Apparently you can order replacements, too. Cleaning of the Styrofoam bottom is easy because it is a smooth shell with no channels.

CONS:
Humidity:
Figuring out the humidity is a trial-and-error guessing game at best. The four water channels allow for endless variations and combinations to provide the humidity you want, but you have to determine that on your own. Channel No. 1 holds the most water; Channel No. 4 holds the least. And, of course, there's no way to have a predetermination of "filling this plus this equals this humidity" because of location, climate, altitude variations throughout the world. For my particular situation I found filling Channel No. 1 plus a slight splash overflow into Channel No. 2 gave an ideal incubation humidity; No. 1 and No. 4 was ideal for hatching. The channels hold about 3 days of water (less days in higher dryer altitudes), so if you have an extended lockdown you need to have a straw or tube to wend in through the vent hole to refill the channels.

If for some reason you unplug the unit or the power goes out, I've found the humidity calibration needs to be set again.

Unlike the unwavering Brinsea, the Hova-Bator 1588 is sensitive to dipping cold room temperatures, but not seemingly as much as other Styrofoam incubators are. A towel wrapped around it helped keep the interior temperature steady.

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OVERALL IMPRESSION:
If this is your very first incubator, you'll be spoiled right off the bat and get to avoid the hand-wringing and double-checking that most styro-bators entail once you figure out what water channels work out best for the humidity you want to maintain. The only real work during the operation is knowing when to refill the channels. Thus far it has been a steady and reliable machine. It hatches well and the views are great. It's a little bit more pricey than your average Styrofoam incubator, but you understand why when you see it in action.

If you're a hatchaholic you'll find your addiction greatly enabled..... And that's a good thing!

Having had an old 25 y.o. Miller styrofoam incubator that had done admirable yeoman's duty, I moved to a climate and altitude that was wreaking havoc on my hatch rates because the temps and humidity were hard to maintain. I needed steady, I needed impenetrable, I needed reliable, I needed not to have to check the temps every hour or so or flood the incubator because it is so darn dry out you can't get a stable humidity. The old incubator worked fine, but the challenges of hatching at a higher altitude were extreme and getting a less than 10% hatch rate is not acceptable. I had to give those expensive shipped eggs an edge and a better than fighting chance. I cannot control the brutality of the USPS which so graciously prescrambled lots of my eggs, nor did I have control over the pore size of eggs laid at sea level not being conducive to thin mountain air. But I could given the right circumstances more accurately control the physical incubation variables. Yeppers, it was time for an upgrade.

Bought from Amazon: The Brinsea Octagon 20 Advance with Auto Turner shipped from Amazon and the matching humidity pump shipped from AvianWeb.

Incubator
PROS: The Brinsea Octagon 20 Advance with auto turner and humidity pump is a SWEET machine. It takes up less room than a styrofoam box incubator and stores easily. The temperature and humidity readout and controls make operating it so amazingly simple...just set and forget. Honestly, fussing over the incubator is a thing of the past unless you're OCD about hanging around the incubator. It heats up to where you want it in half an hour and stabilizes the humidity in one hour....and that's it. The unit I got was particularly plug and play and accurately calibrated right out of the box. It's easy to program. The digital display allows you to set the temp in either C or F and you can set an alarm for if the temps get above or below a certain level...or not set them at all if you don't want to utilize that feature. If you purchased the optional humidity pump you can set the humidity rate; Otherwise, the readout lets you know what the humidity is. There's also a cool down feature that you can program that mimics a hen leaving the nest where eggs cool a bit...or not program at all if you don't want that feature.
CONS: This unit is smaller than your standard incubator and as such has a limited amount of space for chicks to move about in.
About the only bells and whistles the Octagon Advance 20 doesn't have is a calendar alarm to let you know when it's time to turn off the turner and increase the humidity for hatching lockdown. Maybe the next iteration of the Advance Brinsea will have it or -- better yet -- an auto function that lets you just set eggs and come back for chicks.

Humidity Pump
PROS: Setting it up was fairly easy and the pictures in the instruction manual are quite helpful, especially with threading the tubing for the humidity pump. If you choose the humidity pump option, the pump electricals connect directly to the top of the incubator, so there is not a third plug for the wall outlets. There's no need to prime the tubing, either, as the rotating motion of the pump will send the water to its destination. The best thing, though, is that you can set the amount of humidity you want with a digital display...and that's it. At lock down you increase the humidity...and that's it. No worries about dropping humidity levels (unless you let the ample pump reservoir run dry) as the machine takes care of it.
CONS: With the humidity pump, however, the moisture is delivered to a pad folded above the eggs which takes up a bit of incubator head space.
If purchased without the humidity pump, filling the wells in the bottom of the incubator carriage underneath the hatching tray is what supplies the humidity: Fill one for incubation and both for lockdown hatching.

One thing extremely odd was the egg rack buffers and egg basket padding were included with the humidity pump, NOT with the incubator. Although both were purchased from Amazon, they were shipped from different suppliers. Together it made for a nice, complete unit. But purchased alone, the incubator would've just had removable wire racks to hold the eggs in place in the incubator and no padding for the bottom of the plastic egg tray. The packaging didn't make sense to me. I'm sure, though, that those that didn't receive the padding could improvise (use egg cartons?) or buy additional supplies directly from Brinsea.

Auto Turner
PROS: The auto turner is a nice feature and the Octagon fits snugly into it. It does seem to tilt to an extreme, however, and does a fairly quick rotation (half an hour). Without an autoturner, though, the Octagon is easy to place on its many angled sides to manually tilt the eggs
CONS: I found the assembly screws very tight to put in.


Final thoughts:
It's so nice to have the anxiety of mechanics taken out of the equation of hatching. This Brinsea model will let you hatch with confidence. Heck, you can take off for a couple of days without worry if you want. It is a well-engineered and well-thought-out reliably steady unit. The price is a splurge, but well worth it. You truly do get what you pay for....a superb incubator.

Having done the penlight and then the flashlight with a cardboard cutout for egg checking, I decided to moderninze and upgrade. This Cool-Lite works great, even on Marans eggs. Admittedly you may not get the definition of veining like you would with white-shelled eggs, but you can definitely see blobs in those chocolate eggs. What I really enjoy is that you can place this on the top of the eggs in the turning trays and see the embryos move in the spotlight (do in a very dark room). No risk of dropped eggs!