Best Incubator for Beginners: How to Pick Your First One

The two numbers, and where you measure them

Forced-air machines run a fan, so the air inside sits at close to one temperature, and the standard target is 99.5F (37.5C). Still-air machines have no fan. Warm air stacks toward the top of the box, so the reading is taken at the top of the egg, and the usual target there's 101 to 102F. Published figures wander by a degree or so between one extension bulletin and the next, which is a fair indication of how much precision that second number really carries. A thermometer lying flat on the wire floor is reading the air under the eggs, which isn't the level either target refers to.

Both numbers assume the thermometer is telling the truth, and cheap probes are routinely off by a degree in either direction. Run warm and the hatch comes early with weak chicks. Run cool and it drags out, and some of them never finish. The cheap fix is to put two independent thermometers in the box and see whether they agree with each other before any eggs go in. If they disagree by more than half a degree you don't yet know what your incubator is running at, and a week of running it empty is how you find that out instead of finding it out on day 19.

Still-air, forced-air, and what the money buys

Three tiers sit in the beginner range, and the gap between them is control rather than capacity.

• Styrofoam still-air boxes. The cheapest way in and the least forgiving of the three. No fan, a real temperature gradient inside, and turning that's either done by hand or bought as an add-on tray. They hatch chicks. A sunny afternoon in the wrong room will still walk the temperature up several degrees, because nothing inside is moving the heat around.
• Molded plastic forced-air units with a built-in turner. A fan, a digital display, a water channel you fill from outside, and a lid you don't have to open three times a day. This is the tier a first hatch belongs in, and it's where most of the money on this page sits.
• Small precision machines. Seven eggs in the Brinsea Mini II Advance, on a turner that runs to a set interval, 45 minutes out of the box. You pay more for fewer eggs, which reads wrong on a shelf and starts making sense around the third hatch.

The Nurture Right 360 sits in the middle tier and is the pick for most first hatches. It's forced-air, it turns on its own, it fills with water from outside, and the candler molded into the lid removes the job beginners find fiddliest. Its own limitation is worth naming: the temperature adjusts in half-degree steps rather than tenths, so your choice near the target is 99.5F or 100.0F with nothing in between. For a first hatch of ordinary eggs that's fine. For somebody holding a dozen shipped eggs of a breed they waited four months for, that half-degree of granularity is roughly the reason the small Brinsea machines exist.

The Brinsea Mini II Advance holds seven eggs and costs more than the 22-egg machine above it, which is the most confusing thing on the picks list. What the extra money buys is control and repeatability: finer temperature resolution, a turner running to a set interval, and a day countdown that switches the turner off on its own. Check what day that lands on before you trust it. Brinsea stops the turning two days before the eggs are due to hatch, so with the counter set to 21 for chickens the turner stops on day 19, not on the day 18 this page calls lockdown. Set the counter to 20 instead, or reach in and switch turning off by hand on day 18. Anyone hatching bantam or rare-breed eggs a few at a time is buying the right thing. Anyone who wants a dozen laying hens in the yard by August is buying the wrong one and should take the 22-egg machine.

None of that ranking came from keepers naming these units, because they mostly didn't name any. It came from reading spec sheets against what the threads say goes wrong, which is a weaker basis than a hundred people telling us which box they would buy again, and it's the basis we have.

The humidity fight, and which side we come down on

This is the thing keepers argue about, and both camps hatch chicks. The dry hatch camp runs the first 18 days with little or no added water, somewhere around 25 to 35 percent relative humidity, then floods the incubator at lockdown. Their reasoning is about weight loss. An egg has to give up roughly 13 percent of its weight as water vapor across incubation, so that the air cell grows big enough for the chick to break into and breathe from before it pips the shell. Too wet for those 18 days and the air cell stays small, and a chick can drown in fluid it should have lost weeks earlier.

The other camp runs the manual numbers, 45 to 50 percent for the first 18 days, and treats dry hatching as advice that escaped from a humid climate and got repeated as though it were universal. They have a point. Somebody running a dry hatch in Arizona in July, or in a house on forced-air heat in February, can be sitting at 15 percent without knowing it, and an air cell that grows too fast leaves a chick stuck to a dried membrane on hatch day. Regional humidity is the whole variable here, and almost nobody says which region they're writing from.

We come down on the dry side, with one condition. For a beginner in an average house, start around 30 to 40 percent for days 1 through 18, then raise it to 65 to 75 percent at lockdown and leave it there. The condition is that you stop trusting the gauge and start reading the air cell when you candle. If the cell is bigger than about a third of the egg by day 18 you have been running too dry, and if you can barely find it you have been running too wet. The thing that would change our mind is somebody weighing their eggs across the three weeks, which is the actual measurement and which hardly anybody does.

Whatever number you aim at, the hygrometer has to be calibrated or the number is decoration. One keeper in the threads had a bowl of water, a soaked sponge and a humidifier running beside the box, with the incubator reading barely above 40 percent while the humidifier a foot away read 74. Both of those can't be right. The salt test settles it: damp salt in a sealed container sits at 75 percent at room temperature, and whatever your gauge reads next to it is your offset for the next three weeks. (Everyone who hatches has a firm opinion about sponges, and we're going to leave sponges alone.)

Turning, and what changes at lockdown

Eggs have to be turned, because the developing embryo sticks to the shell membrane if they aren't. Three times a day is the usual minimum by hand, and an odd number matters, so that the eggs don't spend every night resting on the same side. An automatic turner does it hourly or continuously and takes the whole question away. On a manual box, three a day for 18 days is 54 turns, each one with the lid open.

Turning stops at day 18. That's lockdown: the turner comes out, humidity goes up to 65 to 75 percent, and the lid stays shut until the hatch is finished. The tray goes in a cupboard for three days. The eggs sit directly on the mesh floor, which gives the chicks something to brace against while they zip and also means the first one out will barge the others around for a day. (The word lockdown has been in this hobby for decades, which took a certain amount of getting used to for people who came to chickens in 2020.)

Set all the eggs at once and this stays simple. Stagger them by a few days and it gets messy, because the humidity a hatching egg needs is nowhere near what a day-6 egg needs, and every chick that hatches early forces a choice between opening the lid and leaving it in there. Keepers who incubate on a rolling schedule end up running a second machine as a dedicated hatcher, which works and is a second purchase.

Candling, and how often you open the lid

Candling means holding a bright light against the shell in a dark room to see what's inside. It takes about ten seconds an egg. At day 7 to 10 you're looking for a web of blood vessels and a dark spot that moves when the egg does. At day 14 you're looking at how much of the egg is filled in and where the air cell sits. Clears, meaning the eggs with nothing developing in them, come out at the day-10 candling so they can't rot and burst in a warm box over the following eleven days. (Half the hatching photographs posted anywhere are candled eggs held up in a dark kitchen, which tells you what people actually enjoy about the three weeks.)

The built-in candler on the Nurture Right 360 matters more for a beginner than its spec line suggests. It's a light in the lid. You set the egg on it and look, without carrying a warm egg across a dark room to find a torch, and without the incubator standing open while you do it. The other picks assume you own a candling light, which is a cheap thing to buy and one more thing to remember on a Tuesday evening.

Opening the lid during the hatch itself is where the reports actually split. One camp keeps the incubator shut from the first pip until the last chick is out, on the grounds that a rush of room air across a membrane that's already drying can shrink-wrap a chick that hasn't zipped yet. The other camp opens it in batches every four to six hours to lift out chicks that have fluffed up, and reports no harm as long as the box climbs back to temperature and humidity afterwards. Both positions are in here, from keepers who clearly hatch a great deal.

We would keep it shut. A chick can go two to three days on the yolk it absorbed on the way out, so there's no urgency at all, and the whole risk sits on the eggs still working. If you have a chick that has been alone in there for two days and is bouncing off the others, open it once, be quick about it, and take that as trading a small risk on the unhatched eggs against a chick that has run out of company.

What goes wrong with the cheap units

Cheap incubators hatch chicks, and these threads are blunt about it: ten eggs set, ten chicks out, in a box the owner calls crappy and wouldn't buy a second time. Another keeper with the same style of unit got 50 percent on the first batch and 100 percent on the second. That spread, same machine and same operator, is a fair picture of how much of a hatch is the incubator and how much of it is the eggs.

What you buy going up the ladder is a lower chance of three weeks ending through no fault of yours. The specific failures in these threads are a unit that died on day 18 as it was moved along a kitchen counter, a fill system built around a water bottle that turned humidity into guesswork, and no humidity gauge at all in a machine sold to people hatching for the first time. None of those failures appears in a spec comparison, and all three came from units in the cheapest tier.

Nobody in these threads reports a failure rate, and we can't give you one either. What we can say is that every hardware failure in the threads happened at the bottom of the market, and that 35 comments from 20 keepers is a small sample to be drawing that line from. (One keeper in there built a working incubator out of a styrofoam box, a lightbulb and a bluetooth thermometer, which we mention because it worked and not because anybody should.)

The cheapest useful upgrade to any incubator on this page is a separate temperature and humidity readout sitting inside the box next to the eggs, reporting independently of whatever the lid says. One keeper here bought a four-pack of them and kept one inside a cheap incubator specifically so the humidity number came from somewhere they trusted. That's a sound habit even on the machines that have a display of their own.

How many eggs, and what you need on hatch day

Set more eggs than you want chickens. A 50 percent hatch is what keepers plan for on shipped eggs, and eggs from your own hens usually do better than that, but the planning number is the one that keeps you from disappointment. Seven eggs in a Mini II Advance can mean three chicks. It can also mean seven, which is a different problem, because roughly half of a straight-run hatch turns out to be cockerels. (Guinea eggs take 26 to 28 days rather than 21, in case somebody hands you a box of those by mistake.)

The cockerel question is the one to settle before the eggs arrive rather than on day 22. Hatching gives you straight run, so plan on about half of them crowing by four months and know in advance where they're going. Sexed chicks from a hatchery skip that problem completely, and for a household that wants six laying hens and nothing else, sexed chicks are a better buy than any incubator on this page.

The incubator is also the first of three purchases. Chicks come out of it and go straight into a brooder for about six weeks: a container with sides they can't get over, chick starter, a shallow waterer with pebbles in it so they can't drown, and a heat source. Use a radiant brooder plate for that heat rather than a clamp-on heat lamp, because brooder and coop fires are the failure mode keepers report and a plate puts nothing glowing above the bedding. If the budget only stretches to one purchase this month, buy the plate and hatch next spring.

The bottom line

For a first hatch of eggs from your own hens or a local seller, buy the Nurture Right 360, run it empty for a week, calibrate the hygrometer against damp salt, and hold 30 to 40 percent humidity until day 18. It turns the eggs for you, it shows you both numbers, and the candler in the lid means you open it less often. Half-degree temperature steps are its real limitation, and for a first hatch of ordinary eggs they aren't going to cost you chicks.

Take the Mini II Advance instead if you're hatching a few valuable eggs at a time and expect to be doing it again next year. Take the Farm Innovators 41 if you're hatching for a flock rather than for a kitchen table. And if a hen is sitting tight in the coop right now, don't buy any of them this year.

The Mini II Eco carries the budget label on this page because it's the cheapest thing here, and that's the wrong reason to buy it. The gap between it and the 41-egg Farm Innovators is small enough that money shouldn't decide between them, and the Farm Innovators holds four times the eggs and turns them for you. What the Eco gives you is fan-assisted air in a small Brinsea shell, a liquid-in-glass thermometer rather than a digital display, an outside water top-up, and ten eggs you turn by hand three times a day for eighteen days. It has no humidity readout at all, so add a gauge to the price. Buy it for the control and the small batch, and buy the Farm Innovators instead if the reason you're down at this end of the page is that the top pick costs too much.

Brinsea's manual for the Mini II Advance tells you to stop turning two days before the eggs are due to hatch. With the day counter set to 21 for chickens, that's day 19. This page says day 18, which is where the lockdown convention sits and where one keeper in the threads puts the turner coming out, at t-3. We couldn't establish what that extra day of turning costs or saves, and nobody in these threads addresses it. Set the counter to 20 if you want the machine to stop where this page says lockdown is.