We decided to increase our
chances of success for our second round of incubation by upgrading to a
Brinsea Octagon 20 Advance Incubator.  I don’t really blame our hatching
problems on the Brinsea
Mini Advance Incubator,
but I do think that the larger model makes sense for our more difficult
incubation environment.  Here are the features that sold me on
upgrading:

• Larger capacity — After
  talking to several folks and reading lots of accounts online, I’m
  coming to realize that beginning chick-keepers should expect to hatch
  only a small percentage of the eggs they place in their
  incubator.  While we can work on improving our hatch rate, it also
  makes sense to hedge our bets by starting off with more eggs.  The
  Octagon 20 holds 24 hen eggs (fewer if you’re hatching all jumbo-sized
  eggs), which I hope will give us at least seven living chicks.
• Humidity readout and vent
  — In addition to tracking the temperature, the Octagon 20 gives a
  digital readout of the current humidity in the incubator.  There’s
  also a vent that you can open or close to help get the humidity into
  the range you’re looking for.  I’ll talk more about humidity in a
  later post, but I think that incorrect humidity in the incubator was
  one of the major causes of our low hatch rate the first time around.
• Less noisy — The eggs
  in the Octagon 20 are constantly being slowly rotated, so there’s no
  sudden beeping and then whirring as the eggs are turned.  This
  isn’t really important, but it’s nice not to have an alarm go off every
  45 minutes! 

That said, there are a
few disadvantages to the Octagon 20 compared to the Mini incubator:

• Larger size — Of
  course, it takes more room to fit 24 eggs compared to 7 eggs, but the
  way the egg-turner rotates the whole incubator from side to side means
  that the unit can’t sit close to a wall.
• A bit more setup — You
  have to assemble the egg-turner and take off a plastic plate to install
  the incubator’s power cord.  This isn’t really all that tough, but
  it will take you about half an hour with a Phillips screwdriver.
• No auto shutoff of the turning
  motor — The Mini incubator had a feature where it would
  automatically shut off the egg turning motor two days before
  hatch.  The egg-turner for the Octagon 20 is a separate unit with
  a separate power cord, so you have to shut the turner off manually when
  the time comes.  On the other hand, you need to increase the
  humidity in either incubator at the same time the egg turning stops, so
  there’s not a huge benefit to having the egg turner shut off
  automatically.  Plus, with the incubator and the egg-turner being
  completely separate for the Octagon 20, if one fails, you can just
  replace that part instead of your whole unit.

I also had a minor
problem that I hope none of you run into — I assembled the egg-turner
and it was missing a piece.  After second-guessing myself for a
while, I called Brinsea and they sent me out a replacement piece at no
cost, but the delay (just two working days, plus the weekend) meant the
hatching eggs I’d ordered online had to sit around while I waited on
the part.  The delay might affect our first hatch in the new
incubator, but is already water under the bridge.



The Brinsea Octagon 20
incubator is costly, at $300, but I’m hoping the extra money will be
worth it.  We’re going to have to hatch a lot of chicks to make
this incubator pay for itself….

Very rarely do I meet a
product that is so game-changing that I feel the need to blog about it,
but Brinsea’s EcoGlow Brooder is going on my list to recommend to
anyone raising chicks by hand.  The idea is simple — rather than
keeping your chicks warm using a light on top of the brood box, you
introduce a raised heat pad that the chicks nestle underneath like they
would under a mother hen.  The EcoGlow brooder uses a tenth of the
energy of a traditional brood light and there is no danger of catching
your litter on fire if the brooder falls to the ground.



The safety and energy
factors are why I bought the EcoGlow brooder, but in practice I found
even more to love.  In my limited experience with raising chicks
under a brood light, the chicks have an odd sleep schedule, struggling
to stay awake all night then keeling over a few at a time for power
naps.  Brinsea’s brooder has no light (except a tiny indicator LED
on top to let you know it’s working), so the chicks all nestle down
together in the evening to rest and spend most of the day working their
food and water, stopping by the brooder for a warm-up as
necessary.  Our chicks under the EcoGlow brooder seem to spend
more time foraging in the day and less time napping, and they just
sound happier — no troubled peeps at all, just contented chuckles.



There are only two very minor
downsides I’ve discovered with the EcoGlow brooder.  First, very
young chicks tend to nestle down under the brooder and not come out at
all for the first several hours.  This can be disconcerting if
you’re a new chicken mom and are worried about your flock, and you
don’t get to watch the cute chicks sleeping.  The other minor
problem is that within a few days, your chicks will figure out how to
hop on top and will spend some time roosting (and pooping) up
there.  As our poop-free chicken waterer attests, deleting chicken
poop from our lives is one of our goals, and I’m not relishing cleaning
the brooder before the next batch of chicks.  Still, those minor
inconveniences are worth putting up with to keep our chicks healthier
and happier.  We won’t be going back to the brood light anytime
soon.



The brooder costs $60
plus $16 shipping and you might as well get it straight from Brinsea
since no one else sells it any cheaper.  The Ecoglow 20 is big
enough for 20 chicks and is what we have, but I’ve read that the 50
chick brooder ($130) will be coming out soon if you raise larger
batches.  I’d skip the $20 “enclosure panels” since you can get
the same effect by cutting some cardboard to make a barrier enclosing
your chicks for their early days.