R-COM King Suro Incubator Review

R-COM King Suro Incubator Review - by Tim Daniels of poultrykeeper.com

Introduction
I have used several different incubators over the years from very basic still air incubators to more sophisticated computer controlled forced air units. The more you are prepared to pay, the more sophistication you get but they all ultimately need to do one thing successfully and that of course is to hatch your eggs !
The R-COM King Suro incubator is very reasonably priced and certainly didn't disappoint me during my tests.
The R-COM King Suro is a forced air incubator that has full temperature and humidity control. On top of the lid is a digital read-out so checking the readings or settings is extremely straight forward. A large clear lid allows for easy inspection of your eggs. For the automatic humidity control, the incubator turns on a separate external pumping system that pumps water from a container (I used a pint glass) through a small pipe and into the incubator. The pipe inside the incubator drips slowly, bringing the humidity up to the required setting.
The King Suro uses an automatic egg turning cradle like it's competitor from Brinsea. It also has a universal tray that allows easy adjustment for different sized eggs. It can hold 24 hens eggs or 20 duck eggs, 12 goose eggs, or up to 60 quail eggs.

Testing of the King Suro
When I first unpacked the box and looked at the pumping system, I must admit I was a bit dubious as to whether it would even work, after inserting the plastic tube, siphoning some water through and connecting it up to the incubator, it worked perfectly. I didn't add any water initially to the incubator so that I could see the pump working to raise the humidity. It was interesting from a technical point of view to see how this worked: The microprocessor control has to tell the pump to add water until the required humidity is reached. It would certainly add too much water and overshoot the mark but cleverly, it waits until the humidity is low for a while before pumping for a second or two. There is quite a wait before the pump is activated again but after 20 minutes or so, the King Suro reaches its humidity set point and holds it accurately without overshooting.
Once the unit had stabilised, I checked the humidity of the R-COM King Suro against my trusted wet-bulb thermometer and found it to be within 2% of the reading. I then used a calibrated electronic temperature probe to find the temperature of the unit agreed to within half a degrees. Not bad, I have measured incubators with as much as 5 degrees of error in the past !
Once I was happy with the operation of the King Suro and it had stabilised again, I put some eggs in to run the ultimate test. It was late in the season (end of September) but fortunately I keep some good utility birds that were still laying well. I added Copper Black Marans and a few Cream Legbar eggs, hoping they were still actually going to be fertile. Success. 10 out of 12 were after candling at 7 days. After the 21 day incubation period, I was very pleased with the hatch 8 out of 10 eggs had hatched. The King Suro had passed the ultimate test.
The King Suro was so simple to strip down for cleaning that I had cleaned and disinfected the unit within 20 minutes. Incubation temperatures are perfect for bacteria to multiply and you really don't want to risk those precious eggs, so cleaning and disinfecting your incubator after use becomes very important.

Conclusions
Overall, I was very impressed with the R-COM King Suro. Another competing incubator in this class is the Brinsea Octagon 20 Advance EX with very similar features. R-COM have certainly got the upper hand on price with the King Suro retailing around £170 compared to the Octagon Advance at around £290.
When it's time for me to replace one of my incubators, I will certainly be adding the R-Com King Suro to my shortlist, it is easy to use, exceptionally good value with great features and is easy to clean but ultimately, it passed the hatching test with flying colours.

About the Author
Tim Daniels writes for the Poultry Keeper website which is run by a small group of poultry enthusiasts and includes over 350 articles in sections such as Keeping Chickens and Keeping Ducks and Geese.