Successful Hatching in an Incubator

Fiona & Hugh Osborne guide you through how to get the best hatch rates from your incubator.

- Fiona & Hugh Osborne

There is nothing better than hatching your own chicks. Using an incubator means you can choose when you want your eggs to hatch so that you can fit raising chicks into your life at a time to suit you.

Getting the best out of your incubator comes down to two factors:

- The incubator you choose to buy

- Monitoring the incubator

WHICH INCUBATOR SHOULD I CHOOSE?

There are 5 aspects to consider when buying an incubator:

• Brand quality

• Egg capacity

• Manual or Auto-turning: 

• Temperature Regulation 

• Humidity regulation

Brand Quality. Top Tip No1: Don't buy a cheap incubator.

When we first bought an incubator we fell into a common trap; we bought a cheap incubator from eBay. It was dreadful. Why was it so bad? It shouldn't have been as it was listed as having many things we wanted:

• Auto-turning to regularly turn the eggs 

• Automatic heat regulation

• Humidity sensors and alarms if the humidity was out of range

Unfortunately, we found that none of these features worked to properly support the incubation process;

• The eggs were only turned by 90°. Too shallow to ensure that chick forming inside the egg does not adhere to the shell as it grows.

• The heat regulation only worked if the room temperature was between 20°c and 22°C.

• The humidity sensor only worked if we were able to programme the relative humidity of the room the incubator was in. We had no idea how to find that out!

Now we buy Brinsea Incubators and we own four of various types and sizes. They've never let us down, are UK made with the reassurance of being protected by an antimicrobial additive.

Egg Capacity. Top Tip No2: Choose an incubator capacity for the long-term