Pet Deluxe Incubator- question about alarm and humidity

[CabritaChicks]

I’m currently using the Pet Deluxe 18 Egg Incubator with Automatic Egg Turning—it was literally the only model that would ship to the island (20% of walmart ships here, amazon does not), and the features seemed decent enough for a beginner setup. I especially like the built in candler- works great.

That said, I’ve run into a small mystery: the humidity alarm. It starts screaming anytime humidity drops below 40%. The problem? I want it around 40%—but maintaining that level is tricky here, even with the incubator placed in a dehumidified room. Our tropical air still does its thing.

If I even use one of the two included water bottles, humidity skyrockets to 59- 65%, which is too much so I've read as the eggs are on day 5. So I’ve been adding just a little water to the opening twice a day. That works… sort of. But overnight, the alarm likes to throw a tantrum when the humidity dips just a hair too low.

Here’s my question:
Is there any way to silence that humidity alarm, or better yet, adjust the threshold it goes off at?
Or even shut it off as I have another humidity and temp measure inside the incubator. I can’t seem to find a clear answer anywhere—and I’d love to get a full night’s sleep without the incubator yelling at me or bothering the 4.5 week old chicks in the enclosure next to it.

Thanks!

 

[Airyaman]

Sadly the answer to your question is "no". I bought an incubator much like like that one, so it's probably a base model for multiple manufacturers and every version (they're just different colors from different manufacturers) has the same alarm with no method to change the threshold.

Here is the one I bought and you can see it's the same incubator, just a different color:

Like you, the alarm was driving me crazy. So much so that I bought a humidifier for the room I was incubating in to try to keep the humidity up to 40% (I would end up around 41-42% but had to keep room humidity to around 66%).

From the seller:

Thank you for reaching out. I apologize for the inconvenience, but currently, there is no button to disable the low humidity alarm or to lower the threshold. If you still do not like this feature, please let me know, and I will assist you with the after-sales service. I will always be here to help you resolve any problems and ensure your satisfaction. The purpose of the low humidity alarm setting is to alert customers that the humidity is abnormal and needs to be increased to achieve the ideal incubation conditions. Therefore, we recommend that you use this machine with standard incubation methods. Finally, please allow me to provide a detailed explanation of this feature, so you can better decide whether you want to continue using it. Below are the details about the humidity alarm function: After working for 2 hours, if the humidity is lower than 40%,an alarm will sound and the humidity display will blink. Press any button to stop the alarm. If normal humidity is not restored within 1 hour, the alarm will continue.
Best regards, Olivia

Now I would not suggest you necessarily go my route but you might try something I played around with that worked decently: get a shoestring and place it into a small container of water you can seal almost all of the way. Then thread part of the the shoestring into the water reservoir of your incubator a little bit at a time until you can achieve at least 41% or so humidity. As the shoestring dries, the water from the container will continue to wick onto the drier portion.

The reason I did not stick with the shoestring and decided to go with the humidifier is that I had other incubators running and while they did not have alarms, I found that keeping the room humidity elevated would give me around 35% humidity in the other incubators (the alarming one ran higher), and I think that is better than the 25% I was running at.

 

[CabritaChicks]

UPDATE!!!
Okay, so… it wouldn’t stop beeping.

But then—get this—I went to turn on the candling light, and instead of pressing the “+” button, I accidentally hit the “–” button… and it stopped! The beeping is gone! It's been nearly 45 minutes now, and the humidity is holding steady in the 30s!

Just wanted to share this little victory—it's later than I’d hoped, but I think I finally found a workaround for this cursed incubator!