Poultry Talk Ontario (pto.ca)

Hello everyone,
Hope you are doing good.

I first tried styrofoam incubator few years back.
Built it with a w1209 controller, styrofoam, tape etc.

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Here is my incubation History:

1st time only one hatched (chicken). 2nd time 13 hatched. [3 died during hatching, 10 lived. Out of them, 3 survived Monitor Lizards, Kites, etc and reached adulthood.]
3rd time I tried duck eggs. Confident from 2nd hatching, I put 30 duck eggs. But sadly, none of them hatched. Almost all of them died before hatching. We were very disappointed.

I left home for my studies, and could not try any further. The incubator was neglected by family members and was pushed around in the house.

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Back to present time:

The main problem of incubation in my country (BD ) is, Electricity. Loads of Load-shedding.

This time, I bought an UPS and replaced the battery with a larger one for longer backup.

4th incubation: Put 8 duck eggs on 28th of June, and 11 chicken eggs on 4th of July, so that they hatch at the same time.

+ Manual-turning, still-air, a 40-watt bulb.
+ Temp 37.7° C. (Return diff 0.5°C, meaning, heat source will activate when the temp is 37.2°C)
+ Room humidity almost around 80%.
+ Candled and discarded 5 eggs.

One duck egg was pipped at around 10:30 pm on 21st of July.
Reduced the temp to 37°. Humidity was around 55-60%. Put water to increase it, and then it reached to 75%. Stopped turning, locked down. Left for my workplace the next morning.

As I was informed, One chicken egg hatched in the morning of 23rd of July or the night before. 1st pipped duck egg hatched at around 11 am.

We have a brooding hen, who hatched just a day before. So, my mother put the incubator-hatched chicks and ducklings under the hen at night and surprisingly, she accepted them!

A total of 8 eggs hatched gradually as of 25th of July. 3 ducks and 5 chickens. The rest are discarded. So, the hatching rate is around 57% (8 out of 14).

I really expected better hatching rate this time, because of 24-hour power backup.

So, this has been my incubation and hatching journey thus far.

Do you have any suggestion for me?
Maybe you want to know something more? Let me know, I will try to update the post.

Thanks for your time. Have a good day.



Pictures + Update: July 28: Already 2 chicks died. Another one is in bad shape. I wonder if it was a mistake putting the chicks under the hen instead of brooding.

You are really not doing too badly for the conditions. Here in Ontario in summer we have trouble with high humidity. The person who is great for suggestions/fixes etc. is @thegawd and @windwalkingwolf

Congrats on the journey, we never stop learning. It took me a while to dial in my incubators for chickens/quail/turkeys which seem to all require the same conditions and I gave up trying ducks because I could never get them to hatch.

I found the poultry seem to do best with 45% relative humidity during incubation and then 60% for the last 4 days (lockdown).

Then there's waterfowl. I could never figure it out and had low hatch rates. Well I took an extended break from poultry and unfortunately from the site as well after I lost lots of expensive birds one weekend many years ago. When we finally got back into it we wanted more ducks. And we got a drake for our duck and a dozen hatching eggs.

I was so nervous about trying to incubate duck eggs again and it was actually my wife who did a tonne of research into successfully hatching duck eggs. She proposed to keep the humidity at 60% and to spray the eggs often to temporarily increase the humidity even more, simulating a broody duck that just came from a pond. I said that we can't spray the incubator as there is a lot of metal inside and I wasnt comfortable with it BUT we could spray the hatcher as its built entirely different and we will just hand turn the eggs and spray them then.

We have successfully hatched many ducklings like this the last few years, including just yesterday when we hatched a dozen khaki campbells. We started with 24 I think, and removed a bunch of clear eggs so our final number was 16 good eggs, 12 hatched and we are very happy!

Somewhere on this site I have created excell spreadsheets to help keep track of the incubation and hatching process, I can't remember the title of the thread but I'll have a look for it later. Without them, I never would have dialed in my incubators as fast as I did.

Good luck!

I also just noticed you said 80% room humidity. Wow thats high and could be a problem. Try no water in the incubator at all.

When the chick pips the internal membrane its supposed to be air. When the humidity is really high, it gets absorbed into the egg and when the chick makes that internal pip they are faced with water instead of air and they unfortunately drown.

My first attempt at quail resulted in like 112 drowned chicks and 4 that made it out. This was like my 3rd attempt at incubating poultry and my first with quail. I was so upset.

Heres the spreadsheets... Incubation notes.

Incubation Notes

thegawd wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 25, 2023 10:59 pm

I also just noticed you said 80% room humidity. Wow thats high and could be a problem. Try no water in the incubator at all.

Didn’t put any water in the bator before the lockdown.
During lockdown, humidity was 75% inside the incubator. It was about 60% without the water.

3 of my ducklings hatched out of 7 eggs.

You could experiment with chicken and duck eggs together sometime.

Thank you so much for your comments and info.

Happy hatching.

thegawd wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 25, 2023 11:08 pm

Heres the spreadsheets... Incubation notes.

Incubation Notes

Thanks for going through trouble and combing it out for me @thegawd! Appreciate it!

No problem! I just took a look at a map to see where exactly Bangladesh is, so your off the coast of the Indian ocean in the middle of Asia. That is really cool! I'm guessing its mostly jungle and the humidity is always high. I wonder what breeds your working with? So you also live where the natural original chicken lives... the jungle fowl! I'm sure that high humidity doesn't bother them. And that the chickens your working with are possibly more closely related to the wild breed more than what most of us are working with. Thats just sooo cool and really interesting to me. I see you have the same ducks I do, Khaki Campbells, they are great ducks!

You should share some pics of your birds!

Take care.

@arshajib can you lower the room humidity somehow?