Tired of cleaning the chicken water dish? In this video, I will show you the process I used to build our no-maintenance watering system and install it in our chicken coop. This system was designed to tie into a future rain barrel system that I hope to setup soon.
To teach the chickens how to drink from it, I held each of their beaks up to the chicken nipple until the water dripped out. It took a few tries for each bird over a period of a couple days, and only when I took away their plastic dish and they were thirsty enough, did they really catch on to the chicken nipples. The chickens have been exclusively drinking from the nipples for about three days now.
I hope this helps inspire some ideas for your coop as well!
Over the past year I have received overwhelming support and feedback on my chicken coop design and construction. There have been so many wonderful comments and so many have copied this coop and made it one of their own. During this chicken coop building season (yes there is a season for these things) I have received quite a few questions on various aspects of the coop and so I thought it would be nice to run through and answer a few of the ones I hear most frequently.
Does the feed get stuck in the feeder? Does the feed spill on the ground? The feed has no trouble gravity feeding down the center pipe and into each trough on the sides. While the chickens eat they shake it a bit and the feed gently falls down where they can get to it with no trouble. Some feed does spill out, especial when the feeder is full. This has not been an issue as they scratch and peck and get at it off of the ground and also get some needed grit in the process.
Does a lot of water drip on the ground? In short, yes, however this has not really been an issue outside the coop as I have sand under it and it drains right away. Inside the coop I have a deflector that direct the extra drips into the cleanout pan and bedding.
What about ventilation? I have a small window above the nesting boxes that was not shown in the construction video. This provides good airflow in the summer. In the winter, we have the door open tot he coop all day and there are enough cracks and gaps in the siding to allow for decent air to get in.
Why dont you let them free range? We have tried letting them out in our yard a little at a time and they just do too much damage too quickly. They tear into the garden, scratch through the mulch around the trees, poop all over the grass, and eat anything we have growing in the garden. We designed the chicken tractor to move them around and let them scratch through the grass in a contained area. We also let them loose in the garden in fall when we are done growing.
How do you prevent freezing? This year we used heat tape and insulation to wrap the outside portion of the watering system. This was not sufficient to keep the inside portion thawed as well when we had sustained temps below 0 degrees. I will redesign and only heat the inside portion this year. video to follow.
What would you do differently? First I would make the cleanup tray access door about 2 inches larger to allow for a heaping pile of bedding to fit out on top of the tray when I pull it though (suggested by a subscriber, thanks!). I would also have used larger door latches instead of those cheap bolt locks on the chicken run door. Lastly, I would have raised the nesting boxes up about 4 inches from the main coop floor.
Is the cleanout tray needed and worth it? This is completely up to you. I personally love it and I think it makes it so easy to just pull it out on the wheel barrow and take it back to dump it. You can just leave it out and pull up the wheel barrow next tot he coop and sweep the bedding out. Either way it is still super easy to clean.
I hope that helps answer some of the common questions. If you have any comments or questions I did not answer please let me know!
In this video, I discuss some of the annual things I like to do to prepare our heating system for the winter months. It is very important to at least do a basic inspection of your furnace and heating system at least once per year to avoid any surprises in the middle of the winter! No one likes to be without heat and the cost of a rush service call or weekend service call can be very high. If you follow these basic instructions to service your furnace and heating components it can make a huge different in mitigating against any furnace problems.
I discuss basic furnace inspection, cleaning, replacing filters, servicing humidifiers, and balancing the heating system for optimal air flow throughout your home. The last step is something that many people leave out of their annual routine and something I would highly recommend doing. You can have the most efficient furnace in the world but if you do not direct the air properly it will not be efficient at all!
Check out this video to see how easy to clean the Easy-to-Clean Chicken coop really is! When I first had the idea (well my wife had the idea), about owning chickens one of the first concerns I had was about cleaning up the mess. I remembered days of my youth when we had to shovel out the chicken coop, what a mess! Dusty, dirty, smelly, hard work shoveling manure, shavings, and pure filth! I wanted to design a coop that made this job easy and I think that I have attained that goal, what do you think?
The cleanup tray is the heart of the idea with this coop. All of the chicken manure and bedding can be swept into the tray from the nesting boxes and around the edges of the coop in a matter of a few minutes. The tray is then pulled out and taken back to the compost pile to be quickly cleaned up while adding some needed nitrogen to the this falls pile of leaves. The tray can then be returned to the coop and new shavings added, and that is it!
If you have watched some of my other videos you may have noticed that I like to reuse all of our paper products that we use in our home. I use cardboard for landscaping, paper for compost, newspaper for the worm bin, paper towel rolls for trees, and everything else goes into making compressed briquettes for burning in the wood burner. I am also saving some of the paper shredding that is safe for compost for use as bedding in the coop. It is not that the pine shavings are very expensive but just another way to reuse things that we would normally ship off to recycle, and dont get me started on recycling paper! I will just say this, it is not really good for the environment.
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