Chicken Egg Incubation Problems
If you’ve tried incubating chicken eggs, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself dealing with some chicken egg incubation problems. No hatch is 100% perfect and even folks seasoned at hatching eggs in an incubator will find themselves facing some chicken incubation problems at some point.
Unfortunately we are speaking from experience so we are going to share the most common chicken egg incubation problems and the deadly experience we had.
Last spring, we had a really horrible experience on the homestead that left us devastated and completely baffled. It was an awful experience I knew I wanted to write about so I could help prevent it from happening to other folks.
But I was so upset about the experience, I just couldn’t write about it at first. Now that some time has passed, I’m finally able to write about what happened.

Our devastating experience hatching chicken eggs
So what happened that was so horrible? We sadly lost every single developing chick in our incubator. Instead of celebrating our first hatch of the season last spring, we were throwing out an incubator full of fertile eggs we collected from our hens.
The first time I candled the eggs, we could see healthy embryos and the red veins in a spider web pattern. The next time I candled the eggs a couple days later, I saw red rings in every.single.egg.
I thought maybe I was wrong so I put every egg back in the incubator and decided to candle them again the next morning. Sadly the next day I confirmed that every developing chick had died and had not developed past the first week of growth.
My kids were especially devastated since selling the chicks they hatched was a project they were doing to earn money for an upcoming family trip.
Trouble Shooting Chicken Egg Incubation Problems
As I wrote about in our article on how to hatch chicks in an incubator, I am meticulous about cleanliness in our incubator and we have always had high hatch rates in the past. I won’t incubate soiled eggs to prevent bacteria growth in the incubator and I always use plastic gloves when handling the eggs.
Our incubator digital thermometer read that the heat level was in the 99.5-100 degree F range which was the correct range. The hygrometer showed the correct humidity range. None of the eggs had a foul odor and there was nothing seeping out of them. I was totally baffled!
The only odd thing that happened was in the first week of incubation. My 11 year old woke up in the middle of the night to the alarm on the incubator beeping that the temperature was too high. We had warmed up our incubator correctly and it was working fine before loading the fertile eggs so this was very unusual.
She was going to wake me up but then the alarm stopped when the temperature dropped down to a lower reading in the correct range. We didn’t think anything of it since we had read a brief temperature change outside the correct range shouldn’t harm the eggs.
The digital thermometer reading on the incubator was showing a temperature in the correct zone so we kept incubating the eggs and looking forward to hatch day.
I began researching online to try and figure out what may have gone wrong that killed every developing chick in our incubator. The two most helpful articles I read were this one from the University of California with a very handy chart documenting common incubation problems, causes and remedies.
The second article describes how to do an “eggtopsy” , where you open the unhatched egg to analyze it and try to determine why it stopped developing and did not hatch. This helped me pinpoint about when the developing chicks died in our incubator.
As I worked my way through troubleshooting what happened, I found myself very hesitant to ever incubate fertile eggs and hatch chicks ever again. If I had no idea what caused the death, how could I prevent it from happening again? I cleaned the incubator and pondered what to do.
Then I decided to test the accuracy of the digital thermometer reading, a tip I read in a backyard chicken forum. I bought two little thermometers (it’s especially great when you find one that is a thermometer and hygrometer in one!) and decided to test the temperature in both of our incubators.
I couldn’t believe what we discovered! The thermometer I put inside the incubator showed a temperature reading about 15 degrees below the digital reading on the top of the incubator!
I swapped the little thermometers I had bought to test inside the incubators, wanting to make sure it wasn’t faulty. Sure enough, the second little thermometer I had bought also showed a temperature reading inside the incubator 15 degrees lower than the correct range.
After realizing that the heater and temperature gauge were no longer working properly, I noticed the major temperature difference when I put my hand inside the broken incubator and our other one that was working properly. Since we only had one incubator on previously, I hadn’t noticed that the incubator air inside was not as warm as it should be.
I contacted the company where we bought our incubator and was told the incubator was past the warranty time frame so we needed to contact the manufacturer. I did that and found out they also do not have a warranty on an incubator older than two years and don’t sell the replacement part we needed.
We ended up buying this new model of incubator we love so my kids could restart their chick hatching project. Now that we know exactly what caused our whole incubator full of eggs to die, we felt more confident about incubating eggs again.
In every hatch since that horrible experience, we always use an additional thermometer and hygrometer in the incubator to better monitor the heat and moisture levels inside the incubator and not rely on the accuracy of the digital reading on the incubator. Lesson learned the hard way!