[Womble]

Hi Folks,

This is part rant, and part looking for your advice.

We asked my parents for an incubator for Christmas a year ago. My Dad's a gardener with poor hearing, and proudly bought us a propagator instead. Love you Dad!  . However, after much research, we purchased an R-Com King Suro incubator. £150 for a fully automatic 24 egg incubator with humidity control - perfect, I thought!

Since then, we've had half a dozen awful hatches, one due to the room being too cold I think, two due to the temperature control having drifted off calibration, two for no apparent reason and the last one due to humidity issues I think. Even then, no matter what I did, the temperature did not seem even across the incubator, and I came very close to giving up on it.

The final straw came yesterday. I turned it on for a couple of hours, checked it was holding temperature (not even throughout of course, but ho hum), then put in a dozen goose eggs and went out for the afternoon. I came back to a burning smell, to find the incubator running at 70 degC (I hadn't touched the controls when I put the eggs in), and a load of fried eggs  . The high temperature has now completely knackered the electronics, and I currently have it running at 60 degC and climbing, whilst reading 0 degC and 0% humidity. Just out of warranty too - Brilliant!

So, I've had enough!  It's cost us far more than its purchase price in failed hatches, and is now going in the dustbin.

So, your recommendations please for a reliable incubator that will:

• Take approx. 24 regular hens eggs
• Also take duck and goose eggs
• Have an auto-turn feature (though if I had to turn goose eggs by hand, I could live with that)
• Be insulated enough to work ok in an old farmhouse with limited heating (For the Rcom to work, apparently the room has to be at 25 degC. Like that's ever going to happen!?).
• Be easy to disinfect.
• Not blow up on me after just over a year!

Automatic humidity is optional - I wouldn't pay extra for it now, since it seems the natural humidity here is about 40%.
Thankyou once again lovely people of TAS! 

[hughesy]

I've had an Rcom like yours for about 3 years and had no trouble with it once I realised you need to run it inside a box of some sort to improve it's rubbish insulation. Brinsea incubators have a very good name and also the company provide very good after sales service.

[chrismahon]

Our Suro20 is just as rubbish Womble. I was going to run it in a heated chamber at 25 degrees, but then the cradle motor failed and they are far too expensive to replace.


Simple is reliable I think. We have bought a second semi-auto, a Covatuttu24. Added foam insulation around the outside of the base and got two near perfect hatches. Just pull or push the handle 3 times a day to turn the eggs. There is a mercury thermometer to check the temperature. Humidity is the two water baths which in the UK you wouldn't use until hatching. We paid €170 for it, but had to get it in a hurry. That's the unit all the agricultural merchants sell over here.

[AndynJ]

We have Brinsea everything, never had anything else though we still then a hen is better

[Stereo]

Yeah, we bought one of those to start with. It never worked properly. Absolute rubbish. Luckily ours failed quickly so got our money back (after a struggle). I gather that trading standards are now looking into these cheap imported incubators as there have been reports of melted plugs / potential house fires etc.

We now have a couple Brinsea Octagon 20's with the auto cradles and they have been brilliant. Wouldn't use anything else. Their back up is good too.

[shygirl]

we have 2 by Novital and had no problems. and another i think is a brinsea.
we incubated and hatched in a small room where our boiler was kept. it was very warm in there though i never considered room temperature had any effect.

[lilfeeb]

Womble we have just had a an unsuccesful batch, with our brinsea overheating but in this case It was my fault rather than the incubators, it had been in our sunroom and with all that good weather for a week the incubator got too hot.

I have learnt my lesson and I am moving the incubator to a better room.

[waddy]

We have a Brinsea octagon 20 advance ex with the turning and the humidity. It is in a draughty farmhouse (although not damp). We have had one fairly successful hatch so far (11 out of 18 postal eggs - a couple were clear and we did get some that failed somewhere along the way) and the values remained rock steady throughout. It now has six W of E geese in due from Thursday so I am keeping my fingers crossed! We have noticed a small amount of condensation in the display although it is still working well. We have also noticed a clicking sound sometimes from the autoturn cradle although this also is still working well (I am still doing the 180 deg. turn manually for the goose eggs). We will see how robust it is as we go along although being plastic we do have to be careful. We have made sure we have registered for the two year guarantee. Another thing we have noticed is the amount of fluff sucked into the fan/heater area once eggs have hatched. The main body can be sterilised ok but this area can't be got at. Ideally we would have one with a separate hatcher but this one was already too expensive so it will just have to do. Being novices we wanted something as reliable as possible to give the chicks the best possible chance and the Brinsea does seem to fit the bill and make up for our lack of experience. However we found it was still crucial to monitor weight loss and adjust the humidity. The Brinsea we have found doesn't fit as many eggs in as we expected. I would say 18 (point down) full size hens eggs or 8 (slightly propped up) goose eggs is the most I would fit in.


Good luck with the next ones!
 


Helen

[shygirl]

if your incy is working ok, id still leave it a few days before adding eggs. even the tiniest adjustment can send it to the wrong temp with mine. iv learnt the hard way by almost cooking the eggs too. i use a normal thermometer and a separate humidity gauge.
but yours sounds really dodgy. id be worried with setting the house on fire!

[doganjo]

I would still write to the supplier and manufacturer even out of guarantee - no incubator should overheat to that extent.

[Anke]

Brinsea Octagon 20 here too - good hatch rate and "living" in our living room (modern house though, but not using central heating). Never any problems with O/heating and yes the cradle clicks as well when it changes direction.

Why would you turn goose eggs manually?

I would also love a separate hatcher, but not doing it on a large enough scale to justify (only two, max 3 hatches per year, mostly chickens, just now doing goose eggs).

[roddycm]

I got a second hand brinsea incubator. Automatic, 42 eggs £100.00... It's been amazing! I hatch up to 100% if using my own eggs, less if I buy eggs at market probably due to transport etc. haven't tried it for geese but worked great on runners last year... I can recommend it enough! I keep it in the garage and just check on it every few days. I'd buy another in a heartbeat. It's called a hatch master or something like that... As it is second hand I didn't get any instructions etc so can't remember what the model name is with certainty.

[Womble]

Thanks folks,

I've E-mailed the shop I bought it from, so we'll see what they have to say. The temperature controller is completely knackered - the setpoint still says 37.5 degC, but the 'actual' temperature seems to be reading zero, so it's putting the heater full on, all the time.

The irony is i've always had great hatch rates in the past with cheap manual incubators. It was only when we decided to splash out on a posh fully auto one that I started having issues!

if your incy is working ok, id still leave it a few days before adding eggs. even the tiniest adjustment can send it to the wrong temp with mine. iv learnt the hard way by almost cooking the eggs too.

Fair enough - I only let it get to equilibrium for a couple of hours, but even then, it was up to temperature, with the heater clicking on and off before I added the eggs, and I didn't touch the setpoint. We're not talking 'almost cooked' though. Here's one I just cracked open - do you think it would still have been hatchable? 



The other thing I noticed with the Rcom is that it is possible for newly hatched ducklings to stick their bills into the fan.  I was watching one hatch (our last sort of successful hatch last week, with 5 emerging out of 24 fertile eggs), and one reached up and wobbled, followed by a horrible grating noise, as his wee bill hit monentarily hit the fan - yes, seriously!!

Why would you turn goose eggs manually?

I wouldn't want to Anke, but I believe with some designs where the eggs are turned by lever, rather than cradle, the auto turn only works for normal sized eggs. I was just saying that this wouldn't be a major issue for us, but would prefer an auto turner at least for hen and duck eggs.

Right, I'm off to research Brinseas et al. Buy cheap, buy twice  .

Thanks for all your help folks!

Womble.

[Mammyshaz]

We also have the brinsea octagon 20 with cradle. First hatch last year was ok 5/12 but partly our fault messing about with things too much. Hatching 17 maran eggs at the moment, due to hatch Thursday 
We lost the inner basket and brinsea sent us another. There are lots of individual replacement parts on their e-shop and they replied to my email with advice the same day so I'm happy with them 

[waddy]

 

Why would you turn goose eggs manually?

The eggs are tipped side to side automatically as normal, but I read that goose eggs benefit from incubating on their sides and turning through 180 degrees end over end (and then back of course the other way so they don't get wound up). I am doing this about three times a day and they seem to be developing nicely. I daren't ignore anything that may help them hatch so will keep doing it until lock down. We'll soon see how successfull this has been.


The Brinsea does take all the worry out of the equation with regard to temperature and humidity. Brinsea did e-mail last week to say that there were a lot of cheap Chinese made incubators on Ebay etc at the moment that were potentially dangerous and could overheat so beware!

Helen