With our wildly varying
spring temperatures, it took a week for me to figure out how to adjust
the nearby heater to keep our incubator running on an even keel. 
The low temperature alarm went off on the first night and the high
temperature alarm went off on the third afternoon and the ninth
night.  I’m sure these temperature variations will affect my hatch
rate, but I’m actually quite pleased with the combination of the Brinsea
Mini Advance Incubator‘s
high-tech temperature control and our
supplemental space heater — there was much less
temperature variation than I’ve ever managed before!  I’ll count
this first try a success if we get even one living chick.



With
that goal in mind, it’s finally time to prepare for the hatch. 
Except for keeping the temperature even, my only job during the first
two and half weeks of incubation was to keep one of the wells inside
the incubator full of water — it tended to need refilling every three
days.  On day 19, I filled both wells with water so that the
humidity inside the incubator would rise from 40-50% to 65% or
more.  It’s essential to have high humidity during hatch time so
that the chicks won’t get stuck in the shell and die.  I left the
pot guard on all along, but now’s also the time when you need to put
that small insert in place to keep chicks from drowning.



The automatic egg turner
feature on the incubator keeps track of days to hatch and stops turning
at day 19 (which will read as day 2 on the count-down window.) 
When the eggs stop turning, it’s best to remove the egg disc insert and
put a piece of paper on the floor of the incubator underneath the eggs
instead.  (Be sure to cut a circle out of the center to fit around
the water well.)  Paper on the floor of the incubator gives your
chicks easier footing and also makes the incubator much easier to
clean.



When you stop turning
the eggs at day 18, each chick will be manipulating its location in the
egg so that its head can
point toward the air pocket at the blunt end of the egg.  By day
19, the chick will have poked its beak into the air pocket and will be
starting to breath air, and soon thereafter you might be able to hear
the chick peeping in the shell.  The chick can now start pecking
its way out of the shell (pipping), which it may do any time between
day 19 and day 22.  This period is toughest since you’ll get best
results if you leave the incubator completely closed between day 19 and
the time when all of the chicks are hatched and fully fluffed
out.  I’m looking forward to the challenge!

Since our broody hen hasn’t
stepped up to the plate yet, we decided to give incubators another
try.  The Brinsea Mini Advance Incubator caught my eye because it
has several features that I think will make it more likely to hatch
chicks in our variable climate.



Temperature has been our
Achilles heel in the past, so I chose our incubator primarily based on
its ability to constantly monitor and adjust air temperature.  If
the outside air temperature rises or falls too much and the incubator
can’t keep up, it sets off an alarm and keeps a letter on the digital
display so that you know a problem occurred even if you aren’t around
to hear the beep.  That way, you can candle the eggs and see if
the chicks were injured so that you don’t wait out the full incubation
period thinking nothing went wrong.



More mainstream people
probably choose the incubator because of the clear observation dome
that allows you to watch the whole process without bothering the eggs
or hatching chicks.  The automatic egg turning uses a rolling
floor so that the eggs are turned horizontally, like a mother hen would
roll her eggs, rather than tipped vertically the way many other models
operate.  You can also adjust several of the features (incubation
temperature, turning radius, turning interval, etc.) using the keypad
on the top.  And the price tag is surprisingly low — $100 to
$150, which is not much more than we paid for our Little
Giant incubator and
egg turner, a combo that had no thermostatic temperature control and
was made of hard-to-clean, fragile styrofoam.



There are also a few
disadvantages of the Brinsea Mini Advance Incubator that you should be
aware of.  First, the incubator has a small capacity, holding only
7 chicken eggs.  (We didn’t mind this since we want to start
several small batches rather than one big batch, but I can see how
other chicken-keepers could consider this a disadvantage.)  We
also discovered that the incubator
beeps right before turning the eggs — we found we couldn’t sleep with
the incubator in the same room and have no clue why it would need to
beep prior to turning.  Finally, if you’re looking for the
Cadillac of small-scale incubators, you may want to upgrade to the next
model up which monitors and adjusts the humidity.



If all goes as planned,
we expect our first hatch in the middle of April.  Even if we
don’t get any chicks, I won’t blame it on the incubator, though —
despite all of our efforts to keep a constant room temperature around
the unit, we had the high alarm and the low alarm each go off in the
first few days.  But at least we’ll know why we have problems if
we do.  I think this incubator will make a good backup while we
work toward finding the right broody hens for our flock.