Sand questions

[MeekerMomma]

I am thinking about putting sand in out coop but I have three questions to ask that I couldn't find the answers to.
1.) Why do you change out the sand every six months if it doesn't hold moisture or poo. (Maybe a dumb question)
2.) What do you do with all of the sand when you do change it out.
3.) We just laid vinyl flooring to keep the wood from rotting thinking we would use wood chips. Do I need to lay something else down or would that be enough protection.
Thanks for your help!

 

[duckman14]

Ya don't really need to change out all the sand every six months, ya just need to kinda top it off with some new fresh stuff. And the vinyl flooring will be just fine. That's what I used and I've had no prob. Only thing I suggest is to sprinkle some DE down before laying the vinyl or if its already down just put some DE down all around the edges. This will keep any bugs from wanting to get under the vinyl and making that home.

 

[chicksak]

Can't comment on the sand as we do not use it. As for the vinyl we used it as well with the wood chips and found that the chickens slipped and slid all over the place. The only way to somewhat solve the problem was to put way more wood chips down then we used to and found that we wasted so much. Eventually we just tore it out. Its summer now and they don't spend much time in the coop so have not covered the wood with anything else, but will probably have to rethink it for the winter. Good Luck!

 

[MeekerMomma]

Thanks for the answers. What is DE? =)

 

[chicksbunsdog]

DE is Diatomaceous earth. It helps to kill the bugs. You can google it. They sell it at our local Agway store so it shouldn't be hard to find.
We use pine shavings (over linoleum) in our coop and only fluff it up. It hardly gets dirty because we have poop boards with sweet pdz on them which I clean off every day (takes just a couple of minutes). But we do use sand in our run and I just cleaned out the run this week, first time since we got the chickens last fall. I scooped out a bunch of the old sand and poop(and hay and grass and whatever else I've thrown in for the chickens over the last several months) and just threw it all in our compost heap. Then I loosened up some of the remaining sand and topped it off with a few more bags of fresh sand. We really haven't had any problems with odors. The run only smells when it rains a lot and you can only smell it if you're standing right next to it. The coop never stinks. We only have 5 chickens.
Hope this helps.