Review on 🐣 Automatic Digital Chicken Incubator by Carlos Barete

In general, I really liked the incubator! Would have given 5 stars except it wasn't easy to clean and the instructions were a bit unclear. ADVANTAGES: good price, temperature is good, you can see the chicks hatching, put it in and forget about it. CONS: Difficult to clean electronics, side view only, instructions could be better. 8 out of 9 eggs hatched successfully! Temperature Stability: 5 Stars Ease of Use: 5 Stars Automatic Flipping: 5 Stars Humidity Control: 4 Stars Ease of Cleaning: 2 Stars Instructions: 3 Stars As is to be done with ANY incubator, after assembling it, I first checked the accuracy of the readings with a calibrated thermometer. This is also stated in the incubator's instruction manual. If you want to have a successful hatching in every incubator, this is a very important step! My incubator was off at about 0.6°C, so I just adjusted the temperature to that. I also like my incubators to be a bit warmer than usual, so mine was set at 38.2C. The instructions were obviously written by someone who is not a native English speaker but decent enough to understand. Setting the temperature was very easy. I really wish it could go above 40C but that's just me. I ran the incubator for 4 hours to bring it up to temp and made sure it stayed stable before adding the eggs. I then checked again a few hours later to make sure the temperature was still being maintained after the eggs were added. It was like this. The egg tray is easy to assemble and holds 9 eggs. I used 9 chicken eggs from a local breeder. I would say that duck eggs or larger eggs only fit 6 in the turntable. 12 chicken eggs would easily fit in the incubator if the turntable (manual turning) was not used. The egg turner moves VERY slowly. I had to note where he was and check back later to make sure he was actually moving! The flip speed is preset and not adjustable. After adding the eggs and checking that the temperature and turning mechanism worked, I just completely ignored the incubator until day 7. I live in an area where I think it's best not to add moisture to my incubator until day 18. If you were in an area where you REALLY needed to add moisture you might need to add a shallow tray or something similar to the incubator as there is only a large area for water under the eggs. There are no smaller baffles to allow for a smaller humidity rise during days 1-18. The space under the egg tray is high enough to allow for this. On day 7 I candle my eggs to check for air cell growth and embryonic growth. I had 100% fertility despite having to remove an egg that died early in development. The air cells looked fine. Eight good eggs were returned to the incubator. On the 14th day I was transparent again, everything was fine. On day 18 I took the eggs off the turntable, put water in the incubator, put in the incubator and brought the eggs back. Also, I lowered the temperature to 37.8°C, because I have a high fever, my chicks hatched a bit earlier on day 20, all within 24 hours! The plastic trellis provided good traction on the road for the chickens to walk on. Since you can't see anything from the top, you really can't look for the spikes when blocking, but you CAN see them slipping from the side as the plastic is translucent. . I hatched 8 out of 9 eggs. Pretty good! After hatching, you need to clean the incubator. The bottom half of this incubator is VERY easy to clean, just wash in hot, soapy water like a bowl. The top half was more complex and didn't seem designed to be cleaned. You will need to remove 6 screws and carefully tilt the mesh without pulling on any of the wires to clear the area. (see photo) I didn't feel comfortable pulling anything out so I just did my best to clean it up. I was lucky that my lid didn't lint as much, so cleaning wasn't too bad for me this time, but I could see that it could be an issue in the future. After cleaning and assembling, I put all the cables, trays, instruction manual, etc. into the main body of the incubator and stuffed it back into the bag it was in. Made for easy storage! Hope this helps some of you and good luck hatching!