Best Place for Incubators.
Having secured a good machine, the next thing is to locate it where it will give you the least trouble to run it, and at the same time do you the most good. The best place for this is either in a barn or house cellar or in some building partly under ground, for obvious reasons. Though a good machine can be regulated to run in any temperature (provided it can generate heat enough), yet constant thermal changes of 30 or 40 degrees between night and day will necessitate regulating to meet them,—as the amount of flame required to run a machine in a temperature of 40 degrees, will be far in excess of that needed to run it in one of 70 degrees, for, though the change will be very slow in a nicely packed double cased machine, yet in time even that change will affect.
This, of course, could be easily overcome with a little care, yet it is just as well to avoid all unnecessary care and trouble in the beginning; there will be still enough left to keep you thinking. In a common building above ground during the winter months it will often freeze around your machine, and in turning eggs in a freezing atmosphere do it as quickly as you can, as it will always cool your eggs perceptibly, and more or less derange the temperature of your machine. This is of course decidedly injurious and will more or less impair the hatch. Now, this is a very important matter, and people do not give it sufficient consideration.
It is even advocated by some incubator manufacturers, that eggs should be cooled every day to 70 degrees, for the simple reason that the old hen does. They do not take into consideration that it is a necessity for the old hen, but may not be for the embryo chick. When the hen leaves her eggs to feed, and they become partially cold, when she recovers them and brings those eggs in immediate contact with the rapidly-pulsating arteries of her body, in fifteen minutes they have acquired their normal heat. With the machine it will require an hour or two.
To meet this difficulty, suitable instructions should be given with and to suit different machines. Where the eggs are turned automatically inside the machine, it is necessary that they should be cooled at least once a day during the last two weeks of the hatch. Taking the eggs out to turn twice each day, as in the Monarch, cools them sufficiently during the winter months; in warm weather, leaving the outside and inside doors open while turning cools them sufficiently.
Some incubator manufacturers will tell you that thermal changes, however great, will not affect their machines. Their patrons tell a different story. No machine was ever made, or ever will be, that will run as well or give as good results amid constant thermal changes as in an even temperature. It is true that they reduce the heat, but it is by admitting large draughts of air, running off the moisture and completely destroying the humidity of atmosphere in their machines. Then, how about those little ducklings which have been pipped forty-eight hours? They can never get out unless you help them.