Innovative chicken brooders

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chickenlindz

chickenlindz

Songster
7 Years
Oct 5, 2013
1,161
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So I have raised my last few batches of chickens in my spare shower and it actually works pretty well! Tape a garbage bag to the flor to keep shavings out of the drain and it's relatively simple to clean! But I was in a quandary because I had 5 week old babies in the shower and I just got 15 newbies from MPC. What's a girl to do??? Well more garbage bags and the entire bathroom is now a brooder!!! Oh this is bad.....
 
Oh wow! The whole bathroom! I think my family would kill me if I tried that.
I'm planning on using old closet doors as the base for my new brooder. One door will be the bottom, then build a frame 2 feet tall with a hinged door panel, then put the second door on top, and build another 2 foot tall frame, Then, I'll put a top on it.
Should give me about 35 sq ft of brooder space.
 
chickenlindz said:
So I have raised my last few batches of chickens in my spare shower and it actually works pretty well! Tape a garbage bag to the flor to keep shavings out of the drain and it's relatively simple to clean! But I was in a quandary because I had 5 week old babies in the shower and I just got 15 newbies from MPC. What's a girl to do??? Well more garbage bags and the entire bathroom is now a brooder!!!
Oh this is bad.....
Click to expand...
gig.gif
Yes, yes it is!!
 
Since we only have one bathroom in this house, it's good thing I started to brood all my chicks outdoors in the run from the start!
lau.gif
Ken would be livid if I turned an entire room into a brooder.
he.gif
 
I have an old house in the city and it has a former coal storage room in the basement. I put my brooder made of taped together cardboard boxes in there. The floor of the brooder is sheet styrofoam covered in a tarp (to insulate against the cold floor) which then has 6" of shavings on top of that. The room contains the 8 week old chicks (and the dust) even though they're flying out of the 3' tall brooder now! Still finishing the coop, otherwise they would have moved into it.
 
As you all know I found the biggest issue to be the dust so this actually works the best. I've done the brooder in the basement and then spent a weekend cleaning dust of everything (and then I only had 5 chicks).

I've also brooded outside which I LOVE but I don't have a coop free at the moment since these aren't really my chickens (I'm raising them to sell for a friend).

Thankfully we have a spare bathroom and no forced air heat so this really works the best in regards to cleaning. I also love that I can check on them 843 times a day because they are so close.

Hopefully I'll never again have this many but if I do.... LOL
 
junebuggena said:
Oh wow! The whole bathroom! I think my family would kill me if I tried that.
I'm planning on using old closet doors as the base for my new brooder. One door will be the bottom, then build a frame 2 feet tall with a hinged door panel, then put the second door on top, and build another 2 foot tall frame, Then, I'll put a top on it.
Should give me about 35 sq ft of brooder space.
Click to expand...

I found that when using a typical brooder it's the dust that gets me vs the space. I would have happily used something more "normal" but I think I would have ended up putting it in the bathroom anyway to contain the dust so I skipped that step and just mulched my bathroom....
 

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