RedOakGambirds
Glad to hear someone else who does not use much water. We have a very old red cedar cabinet type incubator - a Leahy to be exact - they are not made anymore. The insulation in the thing is so dense that just a little water every other or every three days is all it takes. Took us forever to figure out that we were drowning the birds reguardless of what the hydrometer said. (We have a digital one from Radio Shack, tells humidity, temp etc) does not vary to much from the old fashioned thermometer and only differes from top to bottom by a degree. This incubator has 4 very large shelves and we manually turn the eggs although it does have attachements for automatic turners, it is so old we can not find many replacement parts for it. It cost 30 bucks to get an owners manual for it there is only one in the US so the guy made us a photocopy (for 30 dollars) :shock: but we had to have it.
We now only candle before putting eggs in the incubator and as we are putting them in the hatcher. We use two hova bators, for hatching so we don't have to disturb the incubating eggs.
Our hatches are almost 100 percent since we quit worring about the numbers and started paying attention to the air sac in the egg. In fact we got so good at hatching the darn things out we ran out of cages to keep them in, so were forced to quit. This year hubby is building 3 new cages and we have a brood box that will hold 3000 chicks (seperate compartments) the grow off pens are going to double this year. Busy Busy
Lori