Chicken power!

[rick]

Knowing that we were headed for a cold snap (cold for the UK midlands anyway) I put a small heater and thermostat controller in our roosting box. Before the chickens went to bed it was switching to keep the box around 2.5 deg C. Now its -3 outside and the box is 4 degrees inside by mash powered chickens alone!

 

[Marigold]

Lovely to know you are so caring for your chickens, Rick, but heating the coop really isn't a very good idea. Chickens are fantastically well insulated with duvet feathers and really don't need it, especially when temperatures are only marginally below freezing. If you raise the temperature in the coop, relative to what is outside, they will feel a big difference when they emerge in the morning - like you would, if you went outside from a warm bedroom in your pyjamas. Also, the temperature difference inside the coop may lead to condensation and damp, hence bronchial problems. It does help if you give them a warm mash of pellets and a bit of corn moistened with hot water before they go to roost, about 3.00, they will have full crops and be able to generate plenty of heat overnight for themselves. And get down there early in the morning with a fresh drinker of liquid water, of course. I think you can buy heating pads to go under drinkers, which could be useful for a techno chicken keeper who wants his birds to have all modern mod cons!
So long as they are dry and sheltered from direct wind inside, it's good to leave the ventilators open, and indeed I leave the pophole open all the time as well, and have never had any bronchial problems with any of my birds, over many years, Chickens manage cold temperatures much better than heat - when it comes to summer, they need help keeping cool.

 

[rick]

Totally understand what your saying and it has been interesting to observe the power of mash for myself. The controller has a display and basically, the chickens did all the heating in there with the pop hole open and kept it at 3 degrees min without the heater operating at all.
Both water bowls (a bowl and a suspended drinker) were frozen almost solid this morning

 

[KittyKat]

My grandmother raised chickens in an environment where the temperatures could drop to -30°C over winter, although -10°C during the day was the norm. All of the animals were fed hot mash and were happy about it. The concept of "chicken feed" didn't exist so it was a home made mix of leftovers and grains which was cooked up in huge pots on the stove twice per day and made the house *stink*!

But my point is that if chickens can survive regular temperatures of -10°C for a few months of the year, most breeds should be able to survive the British climate too. The biggest challenge I find here is the humidity, which is very high.

 

[chrismahon]

The original Jungle Fowl only lived below the altitude of the 10C temperature line and never experienced temperatures below that. Breeding for a different environment has allowed certain breeds to cope with temperatures much lower. Our Wyandottes have excellent cold tolerance -but they are a North American breed and they struggle with the heat of Summer here. Leghorns, a Mediterranean breed, are totally opposite with excellent heat resistance but poor cold tolerance. Same with TNN's. When we bred both TNN's and Leghorns in the Dordogne we heated their sheds. In Summer the Orpingtons had fans and the ground was watered to cool by evaporation.

The point I am making is that the different characteristics of each breed have to be considered in the environment they are being kept in. The strong (70+kph) and very cold dry winds here mean that the windward vents have to be shut completely this time of year. Condensation isn't a problem because the air is so dry, we only need to provide sufficient air to prevent suffocation. I am currently modifying 3 coops to fit blanking panels to the small, but still too large, vents on the windward side after noticing that some are suffering from cold- even the Orpingtons. The Leghorn bantams come inside.

 

[Marigold]

What temperstures are you experiencing in winter, Chris?
As Kat and you both say, it's damp and wind that is the problem, much more than cold in itself. Now my run has a roof, and side panels on three sides in winter, the birds stay dry and so they don't have to steam dry overnight in the coop, which helps enormously to prevent condensation. Also, the side panels block out both high winds and horizontal rain, including what blows down in from the roof, even though it has a gutter. It's really quite pleasant in the run on a nasty cold windy winter day, once I've got down there from the house.

 

[rick]

I've set the thermostat at 0 degrees in the roost and made a heated steel box (old Bosch grinder box) as a platform to keep their water from freezing up.

 

[chrismahon]

It's -4C at night at the moment, but adding the wind chill takes it down to -9C Marigold. During the day it rises to 2C with wind chill keeping it below zero. Pretty cold for the far South of France and a lot colder than we expected. It has been a lot colder than that though. Two years ago it got down to -18C and never got above -8C for two weeks! Still feels warm when the sun comes out, if you can find a spot out of the wind.

We have 14 drinkers Rick and they are scattered around in a 580m2 enclosure, so heating isn't an option. We empty them and fill with luke warm water in the morning and several times after that. They don't like warm water to drink, but it doesn't stay warm for long. The optimum temperature I read was 5C.

 

[rick]

The only reason I'm automating so much is that I'm away from home most days and ,well, because I can. Yesterday evening I got home and they had nothing but an ice cube, probably for most of the day so - not good. The back garden is fairly sheltered but a bit of a frost trap in winter

 

[chrismahon]

As I'm sure you realise Rick, if they have no water they can't soften the pellets to digest them. The result is an impacted crop and potential hypothermia due to lack of heating energy. That then leads on to the death of the gut flora and two weeks painstakingly reinstating it. Been there recently with Claude, our TNN cockerel. But the reason he had no water is he got caught out by a sudden fall of darkness (gets dark here quickly but almost instantly if a cloud bank arrives). Ate but had no time to drink.

 

[rick]

On of the things that has surprised me the most about chickens is how totally hopeless they are in low light. Its like one minute their pecking and the next can't see the end of their own beak!