Incubator hatch day CRISIS!

It has been a craptabulous kind of night. **YAAAAAWN** I've been up since around 1 a.m. when we had a storm blow through that sounded like it was gonna take the roof with it! Today is hatch day for 3 turkeys and 20 something chicks in my new Sportsman 1502. No power, no bator, no problem...well almost no problem. The power was out for 3 hours. I couldn't just sit on my hands and let the babies die for cryin out loud..so I put candles in the incubator to keep it warm. That wasn't too bad until an egg tray started to melt from being directly over the flame. NOT good! Thankfully, it had only a couple eggs in it that I could move to another tray. Either way, I had to open the door, releasing what little heat we had going on in there, and cut it out since one little spot had melted just enough to get stuck on the wire. Meanwhile a little baby turkey was screaming bloody murder at me to close the door, he was getting cold! I did the best I could with what I had to do it with, and will update with hatch results to see if maybe I made a difference. The angry bird baby turkey is still alive, so hopefully that is a good indicator of success. I am SO very glad the storm woke me with that crazy wind, otherwise, three hours with no heat and every single baby would have been gone. Thank God I got up and figured out a way to help them!

I DO NOT recommend candles in an incubator! I would have much rather had a back up power system in place to run it for reasons such as this. I did have issues, and had to continually keep an eye on it due to the humidity needing to be just right for a proper hatch, and the temperature consolidated more above the candles since the fan was not operational, than it should have. I just pray we have a decent hatch rate after this. This was an absolute last ditch effort to save the chicks, otherwise, I would not have been so worried about keeping the temp and humidity up for non hatch days. Praise God it was ONLY for 3 hours though, LOL!!