Brinsea Mini II Advance Questions

[bedfordfalls320]

We would like to hatch Indian Runners and Pekins. We are looking into the Brinsea Mini II Advance with automatic egg turning. It seems to have good reviews. Does anyone have any experience with this model? Were there any issues with the humidity? What were your success rates?

 

[3riverschick]

I used brinsea Mini advances for years and just love them set it and forget it .great features. the mini advance 2 seems to be larger ...and as I understand it as a silver based antimicrobial feature which is actually part of the plastic they use to make the incubator .it's not a coating. I read about it and it seems to be quite safe. it's not like microban which is nasty stuff. I would go for it. it looks like a great little Bator and I suspect it works as wonderfully as my mini advances.
One thing what's the eggs start to hatch... I found that it was nice to take out the broken egg shells. here's how you do it :
it helps if you have two people. quickly remove the lid. do not turn it upside down!! and set it quickly on the table. reach in and get the broken egg shells . put the lid back on quickly. this should take about 5 Seconds. have the second person watch for chicken Toes that they don't get trapped underneath the lid when you put the lid back on
I found this to be very successful . Prevented chicks from trampling the unhatched eggs because the broken shells were in the way. I also never had an issue with humidity problems because the lid was not off that long and I never turned the lid upside down!!
it went off and straight down on the table to keep the humidity inside the lid. or I just tilted the lid up a little bit and removed the broken shells . the mini advances come back to humidity extremely quickly and I think that is why I never had a problem with low humidity when I took out the broken egg shells.
Best Regards,
Karen

 

[bedfordfalls320]

I thought I would update my own post. This is our second attempt at hatching. We previously borrowed an older incubator and nothing survived. We thought we would try again and purchased a Brinsea Mini II Advance incubator. We set 7 duck eggs, the max it holds. Of the 7, 4 turned out to be viable. All four successfully hatched (and that's with someone accidentally unplugging it for 8 hours). We had no humidity problems and I never measured after I set the eggs. The incubator ran beautifully with no issues. I loved that it was basically set and forget. I did keep an eye on the water level to make sure it never got low. During the last several days of automatic egg turning our two largest eggs did not always roll. I would adjust the egg so it would roll the next time. I'm guessing it did this because the duckling was getting heavier causing it to not roll as well. The two smaller eggs had no rolling issues. It did get a little crowded inside with three hatched and one trying to hatch. We ended up removing the three before they were completely dry to let the last one hatch without all of the chaos of the other ducklings. All in all this incubator worked very well. I guess that's 100% hatch rate of all the fertile eggs. Woo hoo!

 

[3riverschick]

Huge congratulations!
Well done indeed!!
Karen