This can be the direct result of incubating at the improper humidity. I found that I had a lot of eggs that were late quitters, meaning the chick died shortly before hatch. I had used a technique known as “dry hatch” where you leave the humidity alone for Days 1-18 then turn it up for the last three days. I reworked my plans and began hatching other rare breeds but still hatch rates were deplorable. My difficulty hatching Isbar eggs from my flock was particularly frustrating, until I found out that the Isbars in the US were genetically fragile due to inbreeding. Hatch rates have been poor, especially in shipped eggs, although that is expected. Should be the perfect set-up, right? Not so much. There isn’t a window in there so it is easy to candle eggs in the bathroom. When we moved here two years ago, I put the Brinsea in an unused bathroom in the basement where the temperature and humidity are pretty stable. Since we couldn’t even read the directions or settings, we dubbed it “The Chinabator.” I used it a few times but got tired of having multiple incubators, going so I went back to incubating and hatching in the Brinsea. To solve that problem I bought a noisy, cheap tabletop incubator made in China to move the eggs into before hatch. I found early on that eggs incubated quite nicely in it, but didn’t hatch well. From the start, I was less than impressed with the Brinsea cabinet model. I bought a Brinsea 190 cabinet incubator ($1,000.00) about three years ago to replace the small tabletop models I had used.
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