Little Giant Egg Incubator 9300 with Circulated Air Fan Kit

We had great success for months, but these things are very prone to swings of temperature due to environmental factors. This problem is likely inherent in any desktop incubator, and we even saw it in our Hovabators. The offset fan creates a temperature differential which is pretty high and makes it difficult to get consistent hatching times. If you're just raising ducklings for yourself, it's probably not a big deal. If you're using these for surge capacity during peak hatching season, this makes it hard to accurately predict hatch dates, and trying to chase the right temperature inevitably leads to the loss of birds.

So, home use, ok, but watch it like a hawk and have a secondary way to verify temperature. For any serious use, spring for a cabinet incubator, even for surge capacity.

We originally bought the still-air version of this to use as a hatcher. We later added fan kits to reduce the temperature differential between the hot and cold spots, and then used them as incubators.

Quality: 3 Ours are in their first season, but we've had no equipment failures yet, but at this price, you know you're dealing with inexpensive electronics and questionable QC.

Price: 5 A US made incubator for less than $100? This is a good price.

Value: 3 This is subjective. You're trading time for money. I have little time, and so isn't a great value to me. This is my wife's passion, and she makes time, and enjoys doting on her eggs.

--- Long version

My wife has three of these, and has hatched more than 50 ducklings, with more on the way. If you want a fire and forget incubator, this isn't it. When you buy a budget incubator, you're exchanging your time for a lower price.

We check the temperature in multiple locations so that we know where the hot and cold spots are and adjust accordingly. (Note that my fully automatic RCom Max 20 has hot and cold spots, too, they're just less extreme).

We check the temperature at least twice a day with a digital thermometer when we rotate the eggs by and.

When we rotate eggs, we also reposition them so no egg stays consistently warmer or cooler than another, and all eggs get time in cooler or warmer spots.

Humidity control is completely dependent on your environment. For ducks, with an in-home humidity of about 45%, misting the eggs when we rotate them works best *for us*. You'll need to determine what works in your environment.

We double-check the temperature with a separate digital thermometer, and it's within a few degrees in all three, but like many incubators, there are hot and cold spots. We also re-check the temperate twice daily when we rotate eggs.

We've found that it takes about 2 days for the temperature to stabilize. This is likely due to the fact that you only have about 40W of heat, and a pretty significant mass of eggs to bring up to temperature along with replacing heat losses to the environment.

Don't overload it.

We lost a few ducks learning these things, but even with those losses included, we've had a pretty solid success rate with these incubators, and according to our math, an 80% success rate.

If you lack either time, or discipline, then get one of the nice fully automatic incubators with humidity control, which is second only to a broody hen in effectiveness and hands-off operation. If you have the time and discipline to devote to monitoring your hatch, then these are a decent value.

The still air incubators work ok as hatchers, but we've since added fan kits too all of ours and prefer them. We also more hand-on during hatching than a lot of people and don't leave our ducklings in the incubator for very long after they hatch, so I don't know if there's a risk of splay leg.

Does not hold temp well. Temp is off by 5-10 degrees. Plastic rack causes splay leg and the display doesnt read right. Low low hatch rate