Dry
incubation means exactly what it sounds like — you incubate your
chicken eggs without adding any water to the wells of the
incubator. The goal is to get your eggs to lose 13% of their
weight by day 18 so that the chicks will have large enough air pockets
to hatch correctly. Although this technique flies in the face of
the instructions that come with most incubators, many home hatchers
swear by dry incubation and say they get better results that way.
For everyone who loves
dry incubation, there is a naysayer for whom dry incubation didn’t
work, and here’s why — air temperature and humidity have a huge
impact on humidity in your incubator. For my late May/early June
incubator run, I put in absolutely no water, and the humidity in my
incubator was still so high that I was only able to get the eggs to
lose 11% of their weight. On the other hand, people who live in
desert climates can’t use dry incubation techniques or their eggs lose
far too much moisture.
Some dry hatchers not
only leave water out of their incubator, they also use a dehumidifier
in the room, which is what I would probably have to do to get 13%
weight loss from our eggs during our humid summers. At the other
extreme, folks in dry climates sometimes add humidifiers to their rooms
to increase the ambient humidity, although it’s usually easier to
increase humidity just within the incubator by adding water to the
wells. Regardless of how you get there, the incubator’s goal
humidity is 30% to 40% if you’re a dry hatcher or 40% to 50%
if you’re a conventional hatcher. (This is all for days 1 through
18 — see how
and why to raise the humidity during hatch here.)I’ve posted before about how egg
weight loss during incubation is the real test of whether your
incubator’s humidity levels are correct. I know the formulas in
that post look a bit daunting — that’s why I made a spreadsheet for
this hatch that does the calculations for me. You can download
my spreadsheet and
use it during your own incubation run, whether wet or dry. I hope
it helps you get more living chicks as a result!
Dry incubation
About The Author
Anna & Mark
Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton are a pair of back-to-the-landers who have been homesteading for over a decade.
I have a incubator but there is no water inside it and the
Humidity is around 50 to 55… Is that bad because there’s
no water at all? I’m only gonna add water on the 18th day
to raise the Humidity…
Arvin — That’s the trouble with incubating in the summer in the South. It’s not the end of the world if your humidity is too high — you might just get a slightly lower hatch rate. I just live with the higher humidity when I incubate at this time of year.
I love your spread sheet but find it confusing. In column B it asks for pounds. All of my eggs weighed between 1.8-2.2 oz when I weighed them on day 0. What would I put in the pounds column?
Maria — The spreadsheet assumes you can take out the whole tray and weigh it with multiple eggs in it, which is why it has a pounds column. But if you’re just doing a single egg and have no pounds, just ounces, leave the pounds column blank and it’ll be a 0.