Quote:
Now that Matt has mentioned it, I was curious how many times the incubator was opened before the hatch was complete, and if you used any special technique to do it? I thought we weren't allowed to open it until the hatch was complete except for an emergency and then only in a super super humid room. But for me, this is only "book" learning not the real thing.
Which one did you get? Have you hatched with it yet? Ours is the Octagon 20 Advanced. We didn't get the humidifier after reading that it's not needed in this area. The humidity was a little fiddly to dial in but the temp and humidity both recovered in less than 2 minutes after opening. What I didn't like- the rocker assembly seemed to have a lot of potential for stripped screws. The fan is loud which is disappointing in a $350 appliance considering you can get a top of the line silent muffin fan for about $5, retail. For the price I'd expect a more advanced user interface, maybe even a wifi web cam and control interface with a mobile app. But it did take a lot of the guesswork out of incubating, and we had a 70% hatch rate so I can't complain too much.
Up to HD-2 we opened it about every other day, to candle and/or weigh. We also set it on a 1 hour automatic cool down after 10 days as recommended in the instructions. During hatching the Brinsea instructions do not recommend a "lockdown" but they do recommend not opening the case more than once every 6 hours, and we followed the instructions. When we opened it it would be open for less than a minute. We actually had more trouble keeping the humidity down once hatching started, and when we did open the case, the temp and humidity would both recover within a couple of minutes. Anyway, we had no shrink wrapped or stuck chicks except the bloody pip, and she was stuck in a pool of coagulated blood. I haven't opened the unpipped eggs yet to see what happened with them. We had high humidity more than low, so it's possible they drowned.Now that Matt has mentioned it, I was curious how many times the incubator was opened before the hatch was complete, and if you used any special technique to do it? I thought we weren't allowed to open it until the hatch was complete except for an emergency and then only in a super super humid room. But for me, this is only "book" learning not the real thing.
when hatching eggs i always retrieve chicks out of the incubator as soon as they are fluffy leaving the rest in to finish hatching and such. I've never had any get stuck to the shell from it because typically during that time it's reading 100% humidityNow that Matt has mentioned it, I was curious how many times the incubator was opened before the hatch was complete, and if you used any special technique to do it? I thought we weren't allowed to open it until the hatch was complete except for an emergency and then only in a super super humid room. But for me, this is only "book" learning not the real thing.
they are growing up so fast.
