How to decide which incubator is best for you

Hello and welcome to our site, the following hopes to assist in choosing which incubator best suits your needs.

Too often we take for granted our knowledge in incubation and assume that everyone knows what we know. This leads to frustration as we don’t provide enough information allowing customers to purchase an incubator that is not suited to their needs.

Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve come to our site obviously looking for an incubator or a product that will compliment your needs. For the purpose of the following, we will talk about selecting an incubator only.

First of all, we need to decide the type of eggs we will be incubating and how many each batch. As we all know the majority of people will often purchase the cheapest unit as we are not sure if we are going to be serious about incubating or not. This is the first mistake. As purchasing a cheap unit will guarantee a poor hatch, wasting time, wasting money and most importantly put you off from incubating altogether.

I’ll be honest, you can get a cheap incubator online for $50 that will incubate 100 eggs, but this will guarantee you will never incubate again. Some of these are pictured below.

At Top Knot Poultry Supplies we have an incubator to suit everyone. All our units are Made in the UK and come with 3 years warranty. The best and longest there is on the market. Brinsea clinically tests all their units to ensure they work under normal conditions. Cheap units are just copies that do not undergo any testing, which is why you have troubles operating them.

Now I may be stating the obvious, but eggs need to be kept at consistent heat, generally 37.5 degrees or 99.5 Fahrenheit, still air incubators need to operate 1 degree higher. Then they need to be turned at least twice a day for chicken eggs, duck eggs or quail eggs. Exotics such as parrot eggs need to be turned more often, every hour is best. Where reptile eggs do not need turning and are kept in a container with vermiculite that is mixed with water to a 1 to 1 dilution. However most of you are here to incubate chicken, ducks, turkeys, goose or quail eggs, with the occasional serious breeder that incubates expensive parrot eggs for handrearing. Whatever the purpose we have the unit that will suit your needs. Then finally the humidity of the unit needs to be at about 45 to 50 % during incubation and higher during hatch. All these parameters are built and designed into Brinsea incubators. The level of control depends on the unit you choose. Our Eco range are all fan forced, digital thermostats and allow temperature readout via a thermometer. Our Advance range are also fan-forced, but digital control allowing to set temperature at push of a button with alarms, humidity readouts, and cooling options. Finally our Advance EX or EX models, include either a built in or external humidity pump which makes the incubator fully automatic, with temperature, turning and humidity. The pump will pump the exact amount of water the unit needs to achieve the humidity that you have set on the unit.

I would suggest you buy an incubator that suits your lifestyle. If you are going to be around all day and have a lot of spare time, an Eco model will suit you. As turning the eggs will need to be done by hand. If you are not going to be around and need a lot of automation then you can look at our Advance models, and for those who need full automation then the Advance EX or EX models is the way to go.

Finally the size of the unit depends on how many eggs you will incubate each time. It’s advisable that you get a unit that incubates more than your needs. I always say you can incubate a small number of eggs in a large unit and have the ability to incubate more when required. But if you start with a small unit you cannot increase the amount of eggs.

I hope this sets the scene for you. If you have any questions please feel free to add comments and I will respond to each one. Any questions whatsoever. Thanks for reading.

If you are unsure or need further assistance we are only a phone call or email away.

Top Knot Poultry Supplies.