Cooling duck eggs using Brinsea Mini Advance II

[KB031311]

Hey everyone! First time poster here! I have 4 fertilized Cayuga duck eggs that have been in the Brinsea Mini Advance II Incubator for 9 days now. We have candled the eggs at the end of day 7 and all 4 are showing signs of life!! We are super excited and cant wait to meet our ducklings!! The Brinsea Mini recommends cooling the duck eggs for 3 hours a day. It has an automatic cooling setting where you can adjust the actual cooling time from 10mins to 3hrs. Im just wondering if anyone had any experience using this kind of incubator, and if you followed the recommendation of the full 3 hours. I am so nervous to do it for that long... and I'm hoping some of you have used this feature and had success! Thanks for all your replies and guidance!!

 

[smithmal]

I've been doing the cooling for 30 minutes and am not seeing a huge amount of cooling occurring with my eggs. A thirty minute cool gets the eggs down from 99.6F to about 88.6F. I believe the eggs should start being cooled daily after day 10 and they should be cooled to to 86F (per Metzer Farms).

Did your Brinsea Mini II Advanced incubator actually turn your eggs? I'm trying to hatch Welsh Harlequin eggs (75-85g) with it and it wouldn't turn mine as the eggs were too large and rubbed up against each other blocking each eggs ability to turn. When testing the incubator I set the turn time to 10 seconds and during my testing when it did turn, it wasn't for 10 seconds. Maybe I got a bad incubator?

For this reason I removed the turning wheel and, using a portion of an exercise mat, cut out a section the size of the interior of the incubator and placed in divets in the mat so the eggs would stay still and wouldn't roll (see below pics). I then disinfected the mat with bleach, rinsed it and let it air dry before placing it into the incubator. Removing the turn wheel also allowed me to increase my egg load from seven to eight eggs. I'm manually rotating my eggs now three times a day (once every eight hours).

The breeder that I got my eggs from suggested cooling them once on day seven for 30 minutes (which is what I did). I still do a 30 minutes cooling daily but according to my temp probe that I put in the incubator its not cooling for 30 minutes. The incubator basically drops from 99.6 to 88.6 in about 5-10 minutes and then goes right back up to 99.6. I guess if I increased the cooling time I could get the air temp down to 86F but have not done so. I think setting a cool time to 3 hours is pretty long as well.

My breeder also suggests reducing the humidity to 30-40% to ensure the egg reduces in weight appropriately during the incubation until lock down. I've attached a Bluetooth SensorPush temp/hygrometer sensor into the interior of this incubator to give me a better understanding of what is actually going on inside the incubator with both temps and humidity. The temps are pretty rock solid and my sensor indicates that the incubator is 0.5F higher then what it reports. When filling up one of the water reserviors the humidity flutates alot but tends to stay in the range from 50-60%. When I go into lock down mode I'll be able to see what sorts of humidity this incubator provides when both reservoirs are filled.

I'm on day 18 of my incubation now. So far all eight of my eggs are developing. Before starting I cleaned my eggs in soap and water and rinsed them off using hydrogen peroxide. We'll see how good my hatch rate is but so far so good.

My breeder let me know that they use the Harris Farms Nurture Right 360 incubator, have used several and indicated that their hatch rate is 90%. The HF incubator allows you to put 3 times more eggs and the slots are large enough to turn WH eggs (vs. the Brinsea). It also give you visual humidity readings and a way to better fine tune the humidity to your liking. The only down side with the Harris Farms incubator is:
1. HF is now owned by Manna Pro so I'm not sure if the CS/quality will reduce (however I have contacted MP and they were quick to respond)
2. It only has a one year warranty (oppossed to 3 years with the Brinsea which is really nice)

I've already decided to try out the HF incubator as I'm not pleased with the inability for this incubator to turn medium sized ducks eggs, low egg quantity incubation abilities and zero ability to know what is going on with the interior humidity and/or to adjust it.