Suburban Chicken Coop Preventing Freezing Preparing For the Winter

In this video, I show some of the ways that we are keeping the chicken coop warm in the winter including keeping the watering system from freezing. We have had a few days in the 20s here in Michigan so I have had some time to test out the heating system that I have set up and it is working great so far! The watering system that I put together this summer has been working well and it has been so nice not to have to clean out the water!

 

To prevent freezing in the watering system I am using a product called heat tape or heat cable. You can find that product HERE.  All that is required is some electrical tape, duct or foil back tape, pipe insulation, and some zip ties. The installation is pretty straight forward for any piping system. You run the thermostatically controlled heat cable under the pipe you would like to keep from freezing and hold it in place with zip ties or electrical tape. Then wrap the pipe in insulation and cover with foil back or duct tape. The heat cable only turns on when the temp is below 40 degrees and then turns back off once the water is heated up enough. So far this seems to be working great!
 

We have also installed a heat lamp on the inside of the chicken coop to provide a little bit of heat for the chickens as well. They enjoy the light it provides and also some warmth! To control the temperature in the coop we are using a small thermostatically controls outlet. This product is available HERE. This little outlet turns the heat lamp on when the temps gets down to 35 degrees and then warms the coop up to 45 degrees and then shuts off.  We got this idea from someone who commented on one of our videos.  We really appreciate feedback like that!  This saves energy and allows it to automatically keep the temps above freezing inside the coop. I know that the chickens can probably do without the heat but they do seem to enjoy it!

 

 

Next year, I will run more permanent electrical wiring, light sockets, and installing an outlet for the heat cable, but for now I have a extension cord run to the coop from an outdoor outlet on our home. This will work for now but I plan on implementing a more permanent solution.


I hope this helps you with your own coop in some way!


SSL Family Dad

 

 

 

 

 

 

        
 

This post was shared at:  Homestead Barn Hop, Simple Lives Thursday, The HomeAcre Christmas Hop

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Chicken Coop Sliding Door

I have had  a few questions about the sliding door for the chicken coop and so I thought I would do a quick video since I have not really shown the details previously. The design I came up with for the door is very simple and easy to setup and can be done with scrap wood left over from building the coop.

For the door itself I used some poster board to free hand a egg shape that was of suitable size for the door. I then traced it into place on the chicken coop siding and used a jig saw to cut out the opening. Once we had your hole I screwed in 2 2X4s on each side of the framing for each side of the door on the inside of the coop.  This will act as the guide for the sliding door. These guides protrude about 1/2" out from the framing. I used some scraps of 1/2" OSB and nailed them to the front edge of the 2X4s to keep the door from being able to swing inward. I then cut a piece of left over OSB to fit in the track I had created and screwed in two eyelets tot eh top edge.

I am using some nylon rope I have lying around but you can use whatever you have available I tied off the rope through the eyelets in a triangle to leave one main rope centered on the door leading straight up from the center of the door. Directly above the door on the ceiling I screwed in another hook (better to use a full eye here)  this servers as the lift point for the door and routes the rope over to the side top edge of the coop. I drilled a hole through the siding between the framing and roof joists and routed the rope through. The outside of the coop has a small hook and the rope has a loop tied in it to hold the door open.


This setup has been working pretty well for the past year and a half but there are a few improvements I will probably make. I wish I would have used larger gauge hooks and eyes for this project since I have had a couple of the bend and pull out. Not a big deal but just something I had to fix. I would have left a larger gap on the tracking so that the door had more room for expansion and contraction depending on the humidity and temperature as sometimes it can get a little stuck in the summer months. I also would have left a gap at the bottom of the track so that any bedding or chicken mess could not get stuck in the track.

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New Baby Chicks Week 6 Not Babies Anymore New Watering System for Coop

Do all of us chicken mamas think our chickens are the best, smartest, and prettiest chickens ever born?  Love must be blind because we really like our chickens a lot.

And our girls even have different colored eyes!  Ours must be eggstra-special (okay, Ill stop).

But seriously, they have been out in their coop now for two weeks and everything has been going extremely well.  No casualties, and they seem very happy. 

Todd also finished the watering system in the chicken coop.

They can access their water outside under the coop.......

....or inside. 

It holds a little over 2 and a half gallons of water, here is where we fill it.  We hope to hook it up to our future rain barrel system one day.


























It took them just a few days to learn how to drink from it. Several times a day, Todd would hold each one and put their beaks up to the chicken nipple, but only when we removed their plastic watering bowl did they finally figure it out. 

Two days ago, they started going into their coop at nighttime on their own.  Up until then, we had to pick up each one and put them in the coop.  That was making me extremely frustrated because they would not go willingly and it would take the girls twenty minutes each night to get them in.  It was mad chicken/children chaos every night at bedtime.   The neighbor kids would even get in on it, too.  Needless to say, were VERY glad that instinct finally kicked in. 

If only we could convince the kids to go to bed on their own........






This post has been shared at:  The Homestead Barn Hop, The HomeAcre Hop, The Backyard Farming Connection Hop, Simple Saturdays Blog Hop

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Easy to Clean Suburban Chicken Coop FAQ

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!

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Chicken Coop Vacation Watering System

Okay, so you have your own backyard chickens and are enjoying some fgresh eggs daily. But what do you do when you want to leave for a vacation? How can you keep them fed and with fresh water? These are some common questions that I get when discussing the suburban chicken coop.

The system I am using here starts with the Poultry Nipples or Chicken Nipples I used in the original chicken watering system. If you havent seen the video or read the article check it out here - https://youtu.be/L1HeDlewEBc.

We were planning a 5-6 day vacation and our current watering system (the temporary smaller one in the chicken tractor) would not hold enough water for that amount of time. Many times people have suggested that I hook a hose up to this watering system to keep it supplied with water at all times. The only issue with that is that when there is any water pressure on the chicken nipples they tend to drip and also spray out small bursts of water when the chickens peck at them. For that reason I do not recommend this as a long terms solution but for our 5-6 day vacation this will work out perfectly.

I took a trip up to Ace Hardware to grab a few fittings to connect a garden hose up to our 2" PVC pipe system. I started with a cleanup adapter so that I could screw on and off this hose attachment, 2" PVC threaded adapter, reducing bushing to 3/4" or 1/2" and the hardest part to find - a pipe thread to hose thread adapter.

Assembly only took a few minutes and I was ready to hook up the hose and see what the result would be. I just turned the hose on slightly to reduce the amount of water pressure as much as possible. As I suspected the poultry nipples did drip slowly and constantly. I added some river rock under the watering system to prevent a mud puddle (which the chickens love to drink from for some reason). And watched it for a day before we left. It worked perfectly! Chickens had a constant supply of fresh water and the river rocks allowed the dripping system to drain and not create any mess.

This is a perfect way to keep your chickens or other small animals with a fresh supply of water for a short period of time. I have plans to incorporate a float supply system when I redesign the main watering contraption so stay tuned for more on that later.

You can purchase the Chicken Nipples here - http://amzn.to/1uQ8PIM

Pipe thread-Hose thread adapter - http://amzn.to/1KHNRnw


All of these products and more recommended items from the SSL Family are available at the Simple Suburban Living General Store


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Music - "Water in the Creek" by Josh Woodward. Free download: http://joshwoodward.com/song/WaterintheCreek

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Is the Easy To Clean Suburban Chicken Coop Really Easy to Clean

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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