Incubator Frustration
16January 31, 2013 by Mike Oscar Hotel
I’m astonished. In the last 36 or so hours, we’ve had close to 1,000 hits on the site. Wednesday alone brought us 564 hits. Welcome and thanks for reading!
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Like so many of you, I’m getting spring fever. More than just a fever, really. Temperatures here have been fluctuating from the 20′s to the 50′s. The 50′s bring mud and stir my senses.
On my list of 5,000 things that I want to do this year is incubate eggs. I finally dug out the incubator tonight and cleaned it.
It was dirty stinky hobo nasty. I got it off the dump. The Mrs. saw me trying to clean it on a stool in the kitchen and scolded me. I moved it to the dining room.
After giving it a good scrub, I plugged it in to see if it is reliable. While it was warming up, I decided to try and find information about it. It looks to be a Brower, model 845 still air incubator.
After leaving it plugged in for awhile, I checked it. I used a meat thermometer and I’m not sure that’s a reliable way to check temperatures. I’ll probably need to buy an incubator thermometer.
No matter how far off the meat thermometer is, we have problems. It is consistently in the 140 degree range. Eggs, apparently, need to hover a little above 100 degrees.
I looked at the screw on the top of the incubator. It appears to raise and lower the wafer, which should change the temperature. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t. Any help in this area would be greatly appreciated. I’ve looked for answers on the the internet, but I’m coming up dry. Do I need a new wafer? Is it done? Can I drill holes in the top to relieve temperature?
For those of you who don’t know (I was one of them until tonight), you are supposed to fill the pie tin with water to humidify the egg shells, thus making it easier for the chick to peck its way out on hatching day. The eggs sit on top of the screen.
If you know anything at all about this kind of still air incubator, please chime in down in the comment section. I realize that some of you enjoy privacy and would rather not comment here on the blog. If that’s the case, please shoot me an email at tinyhomesteaders@gmail.com.
Wow, I have never even seen one like that. We have a styrofoam (sp?) incubator for our chicks. We tried it once with eggs the we think were already rotten… obviously did not work. Anyway, ours came with a thermometer when we bought it. We finally got an automatic egg turner the other day, and are ready to hatch some eggs, after our bunny kindles, though.
Hope all goes well,
Grace
I’m thinking about just buying a styrofoam incubator if I can’t figure this one out.
Yep, I am excited to see how it turns out. They will be our first incubator chicks! How many chickens do you have?
We currently have six. I think we will double that number soon.
How many eggs do you get? We have 21, and get about 2 dozen a day in the Spring. It definitely fills the fridge! You will probably get about a dozen in the Spring very day with 12, and that is a much more reasonable number than 24…
Right now? One a day. Our hens are in their second year and molting, so their production has slowed. I can’t believe how many eggs we HAVEN’T gotten in the last month. Up until the molt, we’d get 4 a day (one is a rooster). I really want to average 8-10 a day. My wife cooks nearly everything from scratch, so we go through a lot of eggs.
You should get some ducks. We get about 5 a week from our 7 ducks, not much production, but people say that those eggs are better for baking. I have used them, and I don’t see or taste a difference, but who knows. Right know we get about… 6 a day from our chickens, which is plenty right now. Not much baking going on around here.
Close to a 1,000 hits? Hmmmm….. Didn’t I say something a while back about The Lord speaking to me about how my prayer “wasn’t about the rabbit issue” and He said “it was about something else”. I said that He might have something “big” in store for you. Well, a 1,000 hits a day is big. I knew it. I’ve never been wrong about The Lord speaking to me. I don’t know what else to say because The Lord has not spoken to me since. All I can say is be prepared to possibly be the new alternative to SB. Be prepared. I warned you. Tee he he he…..
P.S. I don’t know a darn thing about incubators. Have you called a local farm supply store and asked to speak with an older customer service rep who might have farm experience?
I haven’t called a farm store, although I should. We have plenty of them out here. Probably my next step. 1,000 hits in two days (ended up being closer to 1,200) was trippy. The crazy thing is that I can’t even tell where the hits are coming from. Nothing looks out of the ordinary as far as traffic goes. Looks like we’ll be back to the usual numbers today. Thanks for the prayers! Experiencing what we have in the last year and a half, I’ll take what God gives me. We’ve been to the top and the bottom. The lower middle feels pretty good in comparison!
Could you tell where the hits were coming from if you purchased a premium blog package? Does WordPress offer something like that?
That’s what I’m thinking. I can tell you that that.ain’thappening. I don’t want to spend the extra money. When I started blogging, I used blogger instead of wp. I could tell if anyone even breathed my name. It was that good.
I found this page about stats on WordPress and another one on support forums. Does this help you identify hits and traffic? Can you contact WP directly for support and help about blog traffic?
Traffic and stats on WP:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/
Forums and support on WP:
http://wordpress.org/support/
You’re helpful. Anyone ever tell you that? I mean it! I’m going to read through when I get off shift. From what I can tell, we have good site retention……I think that’s the 1k+ thing. People come by and read…..then read some more. It doesn’t look like 1,000 people, but 1,000 visits.
We use statcounter.com and feedjit.com to see where our hits are coming from. You have to put them on your website to see, but it is very helpful. Hope the hits keep coming!
Do you have the premium WordPress package or regular?
We don’t use wordpress, we have a weebly blog. I think you just sign up and stick the thingy on your site. Not much help here.