Farm Innovators Model 4200 Circulated Air Incubator with Automatic Egg Turner

So far this incubator is doing exactly what it should be - we candled eggs on day 8 (son and husband couldn't wait until day 10), and eggs are developing as expected. We have 2 - 3 eggs out of 24 that are questionable, but it is early, and they simply may not be fertile as we got 12 eggs locally from a friend. Sometimes the rooster doesn't get them all - they sure try though! Please follow the directions - set up incubator 2 days prior to setting your eggs and you will have temperature regulated. I have not had any issues with temperature since finding the 99.5 mark and leaving it alone. I have not purchased extra thermometer for humidity, we live near Mississippi River in Illinois, we have plenty of humidity. I have watched this on the machine and only added a little water once after initial set up. I did take out the bottom plug after adding that water as the humidity shot way up, after about 2 - 3 hours it had settled down and I put the plug back in. The other 12 eggs we got from very nice lady across the river who breeds/raises Silkies and Chochins. All are developing. She told us she has this exact same incubator and it has worked like a charm. No failures or problems. This model from Amazon does not come with a candler - Farm Innovators Website seems to show it should be included, but I still paid less on Amazon than this same incubator at the Farm & Home Store. After reading the instructions, I wondered about the plugs and the fan. You leave them in, except in the instance above when I needed to lower humidity and of course once the chicks are piping. I did call Farm Innovators and they were very helpful - if you have any questions about your incubator, I would suggest you call them.

The unit is very light and compact. It is very easy to use. It is easy to maintain the temp and humidity at a pretty constant level. The temp dial is very sensitive. You must make small adjustments and then give time for the temp to settle. We use a digital remote thermometer and it shows that the gauge on the unit is a little off, so we just stick with our digital device. One thing that we do not like about it is that when we raised the humidity to around 72% for the last 3 days, the windows in the unit stay fogged up, making viewing difficult. We are in our first hatch with this unit as I write this and at the moment we have hatched 19 out of 24 Barred Rock eggs. Not bad at all for some beginners like us. Looking inside the unit it seems that clean up will also be a chore but we will see how that goes.

First day I plugged it in and I couldn't even tell it was running it was so quiet. However, I followed directions to add the water as it says fill all wells full. That was a mistake. Could not keep the humidity under 60. It stayed around 70 actually, even with both plugs out. The temperature stayed steady once it was set right. But it takes awhile to stablize. Don't rush it. Just let it warm up and turn it off by barely turning the knob when it reaches your desired temp. I bought a digital thermometer for peace of mind, but once the unit temp stablized, the thermometer on the unit works properly. The second day the temp was very stable and it was doing great, except the humidity was still way too high. So i opened it up, took out the egg racks (full of eggs) and dumped the water out. Dried it and then just filled two wells (the smaller side ones). Plugged it back in and now its vibrating. Both the fan and the egg turner are vibrating. I tried unplugging and plugging in several times to no avail. Tried redistributing the eggs to no avail. The temp seems to look decent, not quite stable yet but i'll give it some time it should stablize. Both plugs are out and humidity looks much better. Around 55-60%. I will probably let this batch hatch out and send it back for an exchange or refund. The vibration may cause death to the embryos. I don't expect a hatch rate over 50% as about half of my 35 eggs are old and dirty anyway. I will report back on my hatch rate. Hopefully the vibration wont harm them. I'm worried about it. Three stars for now, may change that later, depending on hatch success or failure. My advice is to buy a digital thermometer that has a probe you can put inside unit. Put it on the plastic card provided the holds the glass thermometer. Put the plastic card on top of the eggs in the center of the unit. Also, DONT fill all the wells. Start it out with no water or just one well filled. if humidity not high enough, leave plugs in. If too high take plugs out one by one to adjust. If not high enough after adjustment, its easier to add water than to take unit apart and take screen out and dump water and dry it.

This really does a great job. It is easy to use and we have had no problems at all. Use common sense and don't expect to jump in and get it right the very first time. When you start you will not get 100% hatched eggs, you could get a very low hatch rate until you experiment and learn how it works exactly. Read up on tips to hatch eggs first and then have fun. I suggest you turn your eggs by hand at leats 3 times daily, and make sure your humidity is up the entire time, if it gets dry they will not hatch. The first hatch we did started with around 30 eggs and ended with 6 chicks, we tried turn more and more humidity and each time our count increased. This last hatch we started with 20 eggs and had 19 chicks hatch. So we have learned the machne and the tricks it takes. Also do NOT use the temperature on the lid it is NOT even a reference. Use the internal thermometer laying on the eggs and keep it exactly at 99.5 hope this helps a little.

I ordered this incubator to hatch some chicks as a hobby. Last year I tried hatching for the first time with a similar incubator of a different brand but for a handful of reasons it didn't go so well. This year I learned from my mistakes and I'm hoping for a better hatch rate. Like I said, I'm just doing this for kicks but if you are really serious about a high hatch rate you probably want to go with a more advanced incubator. PROS: I really like that this model is a combo with the fan and turner instead of having to buy everything separately. I also like that the styrofoam has a plastic covering to protect and possibly make more efficient. With PATIENCE and careful tweaking you CAN get this machine to hold a fairly constant temp (fluctuates about 2 degrees at most). CONS: Fan and turner are loud and vibrate. The built in thermometer and hygrometer are basically useless INVEST IN A GOOD ALTERNATE METER! The built in therm is off by about 5 degrees and the hygro is off by about 20%. The water wells are hard to see and hard to fill - I've gotten it wrong a couple times and it leaks all over the place. Conclusion --> This is not a plug in and forget machine. Take the time to get the machine up to temp and then monitor for at least 24hrs before putting eggs in. If you change the temp, just twist knob a tiny hair at a time and wait for results. Remember - it may take several minutes for the machine to adjust and for your meter to detect the change. Once you do this it IS a stable machine. Do not trust the thermometer included - get a really good one that you know you can trust. I haven't had my hatch yet and will update if anything changes drastically.

I am so glad that I bought this incubator! I set it up for several hours before sticking eggs in. The hygrometer without water in the incubator was reading 65%-70%. That is too high for the first 18 days. I took the red plugs out too. I waited several more hours and checked the humidity again. This time, the humidity was down to 50%. 50% would be fine, but I wanted it closer to 55-60%. I knew I had to add some water at this point. I put in a very small amount of water in the inner trough area, not the two on the outside. The humidity then bumped up to 60%. The internal temp bulb is reading 99.5 and the outer temp gauge is reading 100 degree F. This incubator is very accurate. You just have to give it some time to adjust to the environment you have the incubator in. I have it in a room where my temp is 72 degrees and the room humidity is 45-50%. My best advice to anyone having issues with the temp and humidity is to set it up without any water at first, have a temp/hygrometer dial in the room where you will have incubator. Keep a close eye on temp and hygrometer on incubator, add small amount of water when drops to 50%, keep red plugs out. Best of Luck with your hatching!

I wanted an incubator for my daughter's 4-H project and we decided to purchase the farm innovators 4250 Pro Series because it appeared to come with everything including the automatic egg turner for the price we figured it was probably a high-quality entry-level incubator boy were we wrong. On a three day trial prior to putting eggs in we noticed that the digital temperature was off by 3 degrees and we noticed that the humidity was off by 7%. Once we got all the curves figured out and installed the egg turner along with the eggs after the first 24 hours the automatic egg turner quit working and again the temperature and humidity were all over the place making it virtually impossible to maintain any type of stable environment within the incubator. We contacted customer service through email and didn't get so much as a response we called the company and they told us of their warranty policy and abruptly hung up on us we then contacted the company by a letter and they promised to send a replacement egg turner and apologized for the horrible customer service needless to say the new egg turner never arrived. Ironically on the day we file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau they ship out a replacement egg turner FedEx 2nd day air. This is an extremely horrible product in the company's customer service is just as bad as the quality of their product I would highly suggest investing a few more dollars and getting a much better quality incubator such as a Hova Bator.

I almost believed the bad reviews and bought another brand...glad I didn't. Having spent a career as a electromechanical technician I can assure you that nothing is idiot proof (those guys can get pretty clever in screwing things up). When first preparing this to run a batch of quail eggs I had to install the quail rails on the automatic egg turner. With room for 120 eggs, about 80 more than I would ever use so I thought I would just install 2 rails and be able to turn eggs and put eggs about ready to hatch on the wire to hatch thereby being able to have a perpetual run going. The problem here was that the egg turner doesn't run smoothly unless all rails are in place (could be the reason for noisy egg turner motor and burnt out motor). So I abandoned that idea put them all in. I agree that you should get an outdoor digital thermometer/hygrometer. $10 at the hardware store. The directions say to calibrate the probe thermometer...don't do this until it has settled in for a few hour after the delivery. I adjusted mine only to have to readjust it back to its original position, but if you get a digital one you really don't need this one. By the way, both thermometers are right on but the hygrometer is off. After adding water it was time to adjust the temperature and humidity. Piece of cake...Adjust temperature as stated in the directions with one exception, turn the knob fully to the right and monitor the temperature until it hits the temperature you want then turn the knob counter-clockwise until the indicator lamp just goes off and don't mess with it any more. To adjust humidity pull one or both red plugs out to get the humidity as close as possible under the wanted humidity then turn on (or both) red plugs upside down and partially cover the hole(s). I got the temperature adjusted within 5 minutes and the humidity with 20 minutes. The directions (and many bad reviews) say to let the incubator run or settle in for 6 hours up to several days. After not seeing any change in temperature or humidity for 2 hours I decided to run my eggs early. Out of 29 eggs I got 20 quail. Of the 9 unhatched eggs 1 had a crack I hadn't noticed, 1 was breech (if that's the right term for chick coming out the small end), 4 were unfertilized and 3 looked fully developed but didn't hatch (probably the ones I put in a day and a half late. Not bad hatch rate of about 69% for a first time incubation with eggs being stored in the fridge in a bowl. I'm starting my second batch right now with eggs stored with the small ends down this time as is suggested.