Power failure puts question mark over incubating eggs

I am not going to have a rant over how western society has become over-reliant on a limited number of organisations to supply our everyday needs but an incident on Friday brought it home to me. Our area had a major power failure. The electricity was off for over 2 hours. It is amazing how modern life grinds to a halt when the power stops. Because there was a grid failure, and our solar panels are linked into it, they couldn't generate power for us to use in our own home to tide us over.

Among the consequences of that was the loss of power to our incubator. We have 8 eggs in it. I wrapped the eggs in a towel with a bottle of hot water but I am not convinced this worked. When the power came back on, I needed half an hour for the incubator to come back up to the correct temperature before the eggs could go back in. My actions may have saved them but I am not convinced. The eggs themselves were from a friend whose hens were hatched by me last year. For us, this would have been a second generation of chickens. He has agreed to give us some more eggs and we will attempt to hatch a larger number than what is in the current batch as we now have, on loan, a bigger incubator. We will also persevere with the older eggs in the hope that some survived. We will know a week on Tuesday if they did.