A Hatchaholic's Dream Come True

The Perfect Collection Of Egg Incubating Equipment And Supplies

By Damien Andrews

If you sneak outside every morning during the summer to steal fertile hatching eggs out from under your brooding hens, then you might be a Hatchaholic! If your egg incubator is filled with hatching eggs six months out of the year, you are for sure and for certain a Hatchaholic. For purposes of this article, I'm going to assume that anyone who spends that amount of time hatching eggs in an egg incubator must already know the basics of incubating, so they will not be mentioned here. This is a Hatchaholic's Dream List of incubating equipment and supplies.

First on my Hatchaholic's Dream Incubating Package is a Brinsea Octagon 40 DX egg incubator, priced around $500. This is the Cadillac of egg incubators folks. The Brinsea Octagon 40 DX takes all the guess work out of incubating eggs. It really does most of the work for you. It even has an AutoTurn Cradle, making tedious 3-time-a-day egg turning a fully automatic process. You can hatch 120 quail, 48 hen or 24 goose eggs at a time. The electronic, proportional thermostat is well protected against power surges - a common cause of failure in other incubators, and not something you want to have happen when your egg incubator is full of ready-to-peep eggs.

Second on my Hatchaholic's Dream Incubating Package is a super nice egg Candler. This tool is used for candling eggs: examining the embryos and determining if it is developing or is not, and thus needs to be removed from the incubator. The Lyon Econo Egg Candler comes in 120VAC or 230VAC. Expect to spend about $75 for this reliable model. I especially like the push button off switch that turns the light off when released.

The final item on my Hatchaholic's Dream Incubating Package is a brooder box. Sure, you can use a cardboard box or large plastic container, but this is a dream package, remember! GQF makes a full line of chick brooder boxes starting around $300, which can be stacked on top of each other to make more space for more poults. You'll need to cover the wire floor for the poults for the first 5 days or so. Newspaper, paper towels, cabinet liner sheets and no-skid material handles this task very well. An option to the GQF brooder box is (if you have a handyman nearby who loves to work with wood) a custom made brooder box. By taking the time to design and build a brooder box, you can make it as big or tall as you want. Chances are you won't spend anywhere near $300 to make your own custom brooder box, plus it will be designed to precisely match your particular needs.