Ease of Use

This is another plain brown box incubator from China but what this company lacks in creative box design they overcompensate for in unneeded and unnecessary incubator addons. I found the instructions to be written with a bit of broken English but you can generally make out what they are trying to convey. When I was setting up the incubator, I noticed the fan, heater, wires, and some other electrical pieces were in the base underneath the turner trays and that the mesh flooring had decent gaps between it and the wall. This stood out immediately as a horrible design flaw that will come to fruition later in this review unfortunately.

The beautiful blue LCD display is cluttered with excess information, besides letting you know the temperature, humidity, and countdown it also crams the time until the next automatic egg turning, a whirling fan image, and thermometer to show you when the heater is on, and a flashlight to let you know when you are using the incubators built in candling system. For me that is just too much junk on the main screen, and I can see how this could make for an overwhelming experience for a new user. I feel that if an incubator is going to be sold on the US market that it should have an option to switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit, with all the fancy features this was somehow left out. The incubators built in candling system leaves me wondering if this idea was ever tested by anyone who had actually incubated. The concept is great, each egg cup in the turner tray has its own LED light under it, this light is meant to allow you to candle the eggs without having to move them from the turner. The sad reality of this candling system is that it just does not work at all. To start the light is not sealed in any way and it allows way too much light to leak out between the egg and the turner. This ends up making it so the light is not bright enough to see into the egg and the leaked light actually is so strong that it will light up the whole room…I still had to manually candle. The giant clear lid was a nice addition and made being able to see the eggs and chicks easy at least.

Incubation Performance

I found that the temps in the corners of this incubator ran several degrees lower than the rest of the unit, in the end I ended up moving my eggs in towards the center to get away from the issue. The rest of the incubator seemed to average between 99 and 100 degrees for the whole 21 days which was nice but a couple times I did see some drops recorded below 97 and above 102 degrees. These seemed to happen late at night and I was never able to pin point why but I think it had to do with very mild overnight temp drops in the room I was incubating in, this allowed me to see the faults in this unit when you are not incubating in an absolute perfect environment. Humidity was very steady and only required me to add water once every other day which is nice because I felt like adding water to the base where the electrical components are was just asking to be shocked.

When it came time to remove the egg turner for lockdown I had to remove each egg and set them aside, after that I was able to lift the egg turner assembly out and disconnect it from the power wire. This sounds easy enough but when you pull the egg turner assembly out of the holding tabs you are left with a row of trays that flop around and get tangled on themselves. After the mess of trays is out you have a large elevated mesh floor to set your eggs on to hatch with a huge drop off all around it leading to water trays and electrical components. My gut feeling told me when I was setting this incubator up that this was going to be an issue. Turns out my gut was right, hungry…but also right. I was checking on the hatch on the last day of lock down and noticed that the last egg in this incubator was hatched out but the chick was nowhere in site. It took me a split second to notice that this check had fallen down between the wall and the mesh floor into one of the water trays and was partially hanging by what was left of its shell remnants. I stayed calm and grabbed a screw driver to remove the mesh floor so I could extract the chick. After 4 screws and a couple minutes the chick was saved and freed from its leftover hatching debris so it could tell its tale to its hatch mates.

Quality

I really did like the feel of this incubator; the construction was clean and sturdy with little to no blemishes that I could notice anywhere. The lid was a little flimsy when warmed up at operating temp and would at times not seal correctly without a little tweaking. The LCD screen itself is beautiful, the blue backlight display was easy to read and really stood out compared to other readouts on the market. This incubator has a lot of features but none of them really are worthwhile of being considered quality upgrades.