Air filters & chicken dander?

[vermontgal]

My coop is inside my barn, where I also have tools, bicycles, and other assorted "good stuff" which others might call junk. Right now the girls are outside most of the time, but in the winter they are in a lot and the place got pretty dusty last year.

I have an air filter and would like to try to keep some of the dander from the rest of the barn. Any advice about this? Should I place the air filter inside the coop and let it run, or should I try to incorporate it as a filtered exhaust fan between the coop and the rest of the barn?

Thanks for any opinions, or especially if you have tried something similar.

 

[WestKnollAmy]

Regardless of which way you go with this, you will be cleaning the filter twice a day depending on how many you have. I have only chicks in my tack room and the filter on my fans are in constant need of cleaning. I do it morning and night. And my stuff is still covered in chicken dander and dust. Such is life with chickens.

 

[PineBurrowPeeps]

It's awful isn't it?

No way around it really, it comes with chickens. Everytime I keep a batch of chicks brooding in my dining room I get dander everywhere!
HATE IT!

 

[patandchickens]

Yup, that happens

Your best bet is to ventilate 100% to the outdoors (at least in the warm part of the year) - just totally shut the coop off from the rest of the garage. This should be doable.

And then, for cold parts of the year when you want to *use* that sheltered and thermally-buffered garage air, get the airflow going FROM the garage, THROUGH the coop, TO the outdoors. That way no (well, ok, 'not so much') chicken dust will go into the garage. How feasible it is to do this without actually running a fan depends on the orientation of your coop. If it is on the normally-upwind side of the garage, it'll be tougher. Ideally it would turn out to be on the downwind side and you could open an upwind garage window, to slightly pressurize the garage, and get air going the right direction that way - but I suppose if that's the way it were set up you wouldn't have such a dust problem already

But, if you have a choice between using an upwind window and a parallel-to-wind side window, the side window would be better.

If you feel you absolutely have to resort to something electric, I'd suggest a fan blowing from the garage into the coop, with a (protected, in wintertime) vent to the outdoors for the air to exit through. This should pretty much remove your dust problem (and no filters to clean!), but at the cost of running a fan and all the potential pitfalls that brings with it.

I would really not recommend an air purifier, air filter, or fan-with-filter-that-blows-from-coop-to-garage. If you feel you have to have passive ventilation from coop into garage, put several SEPARATE windowscreens (like, with several inches of airspace separating them) in the air path, and use a 'dustbuster' or whatever other vac you got handy to vacuum them clean every day or few days or whatever it takes. This will reduce (not fully eliminate) dust in the garage. But not as well as rerouting the air so that it never goes from coop to garage in the first place, so I really don't recommend it except in circumstances where you have no other choice.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[vermontgal]

Hey Pat, that's some helpful good thinking. I'll have to think about this more. I think I will need to run a fan, because there's not a lot of wind (or consistent direction) in my neighborhood. You haven't ever, by chance, figured out how many CFMs are needed per heavy-breed chicken, have you?

 

[vermontgal]

OK, I answered my own question about CFMs - this looks useful - from the University of Nebraska extension service:
http://www.ianrpubs.unl.edu/epublic/pages/publicationD.jsp?publicationId=598

It looks like they recommend 1 exchange (of the coop) per minute in hot weather, and 1-5 exchanges per hour in cold weather. It also mentions the number of birds, but doesn't seem to include # of birds in the calculation, just the dimensions of the coop.

My coop is about 300 cu ft, so in summer (max) I'd want 300 cfm. The girls are usually outside in the outdoor run all summer, so this is not really relevant. In the winter, I'd want a fan something between 5 and 25 cfm. That's a pretty small fan. I think this would end up to be a computer fan. I'm not sure about how much pressure it would have, though, to blow out dander. I'll have to keep thinking about this.

 

[patandchickens]

Oh sure, there are LOTS of active-ventilation cfm-type recommendations available for coops, I just don't tend to mention them because they're only relevant if you're using a fan and, quite honestly, I strongly believe people should steer clear of fans whenever possible. (For ventilation I mean -- for cooling chickens in Arizona, that's different

)

I will agree that your case may be one of those rare exceptions, if you really do need to ensure proper routing of ventilation through garage and coop.

Sure, try one of the larger computer fans (only in the depths of wintertime, when the coop cannot be just shut off entirely from the garage and ventilated to the outside, which really overall would be a better solution). Keep the fan covered -- or just dismount it and leave it in your house -- during times of year it's not needed.

Make sure it always blows from the garage into the coop, not the reverse. I'd keep a really close eye on it, though -- pc fans are not meant to run at subzero temperatures in dusty environments (there is surely dust in your garage, to get sucked through the fan, even if *coop* dust won't be going through it). And transformers, which pc fans generally require to run off, are not the least heat-producing occasionally-going-wrong appliances in the world.

It doesn't have to 'blow out dander', the dander will undoubtedly stay in the coop, all the pc fan has to do is maintain suitable air quality for the chickens, right?.

If you ever want to 'dust' the coop, just fling the windows wide open, kick the chickens out, put on a good dust mask and have a sweeping spree

Of whatever doesn't go into the dustpan, much will go out the windows, especially if you can run a big household fan blowing IN through one of the windows.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[vermontgal]

Hi Pat, currently I have the coop ventilated into the barn, so I'm going to have to do a major reconfig. Inside the barn I have a chicken-wire barrier to a day-time only run for the winter! (This is just slightly air-permeable!

) That's also why I wasn't thinking clearly about the idea that I should be ensuring airflow into the coop from the barn and then out to the exterior.

I own a small fan used to distribute heat from a wood stove, which runs on AC (no transformer). I think it uses around 7-9 watts, but I think it moves something like 50-60 cfm. It has only one speed. I wonder if I could put it on a rheostat switch to slow it down? Have to talk to my dad (the electrician) about this.

Thanks again for helping me get past the block I had about how I'd already built the coop vs. how I shoulda built the coop.

 

[bayareapilot]

My coop is inside my barn, where I also have tools, bicycles, and other assorted "good stuff" which others might call junk. Right now the girls are outside most of the time, but in the winter they are in a lot and the place got pretty dusty last year.

I have an air filter and would like to try to keep some of the dander from the rest of the barn. Any advice about this? Should I place the air filter inside the coop and let it run, or should I try to incorporate it as a filtered exhaust fan between the coop and the rest of the barn?

Thanks for any opinions, or especially if you have tried something similar.

You might try something like this... It is a workshop air cleaner:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LPD9BDI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_w6v-EbJZXVRQB