The Great Winter Coop Humidity/Ventilation Experiment! Post Your Results Here!

[mobius]

Aww thanks! @Beekissed ! That means a lot! Thanks for your support!

Ok folks it is not going to be s-12F tonight. So I plan to leave the pop door open but I am keeping an eye on the numbers as it will drop down to -4F we think.

Girls are in bed 15 minutes past sunset like the little clockwork mechanisms they are!

Before bed no chickens in coop (in fact they stayed out til the last possible moment and would not go in! looking for some of the scratch I threw down, greedy things eat that before the nice fermented feed I make for them!)

5 pm

Outside: 5F RH: 72%
Coop: 10F RH 69%

(I do have a vent closed which i may open later depending on RH fluctuations) No idea why it was still warmer in there without chickens. Straw insulation value maybe?

8 pm

Outside: 2F RH 79%
Coop: 14F RH 71%

Not nearly as cold as last night, girls still are warming the coop. RH within tolerance so far.

I still think best thing i did was that deep straw.

 

[mobius]

You might be able to calculate heat production by chickens by taking into account how much they are eating. The colder it gets they more heat they produce.

Oh I wish I could gather that data! Lol! Chicken BTUs! But they get a varied diet and I haven't figured out how to measure that! Yet!

 

[Beekissed]

That's a good difference on coop temps vs. outside temps. I definitely started seeing a change in roost temps when I got a good DL system going in the coop, so that thick, insulating layer under the birds can really cut the ground chill from coming up.

Get this....it's in the 60s tonight and it's been raining since this time last night, so the ground is sopping with standing water everywhere...two nights ago it was below zero. Now...tomorrow it will drop into the 30s and by tomorrow night in the low teens. Talk about humidity levels and cold coming together....

 

[mobius]

@Beekissed your weather description is making my head swivel. Hard to imagine! In December no less...that would call for maxed out ventilation, if I were to hazard a guess! ( we might be in the thirties for a few days coming up, enough to get a good ice slick going...and another 4-8 inches of snow (!) and I will monitor that as well). Folks are certainly commenting on keep chickens and coop interior dry, dry, dry and I am getting that, but how, cause when it is dripping wet it might be tougher than deep cold!

 

[Beekissed]

Oh I wish I could gather that data! Lol! Chicken BTUs! But they get a varied diet and I haven't figured out how to measure that! Yet!

You laugh....but they've already gathered that data!

Yeah...I can't believe it either.

http://www.worldpoultry.net/Breeders/Incubation/2011/4/Overheated-chick-calculations-WP008700W/

Random quote found here on BYC...

Quote:
Quote from an article....about heating a greenhouse in the winter months.

Quote:
Here's a blog site and, as you can see, the opinions on chicken's BTU vary....widely...

Quote:

 

[Beekissed]

@Beekissed your weather description is making my head swivel. Hard to imagine! In December no less...that would call for maxed out ventilation, if I were to hazard a guess! ( we might be in the thirties for a few days coming up, enough to get a good ice slick going...and another 4-8 inches of snow (!) and I will monitor that as well). Folks are certainly commenting on keep chickens and coop interior dry, dry, dry and I am getting that, but how, cause when it is dripping wet it might be tougher than deep cold!

I'm one of the few who don't hold with that dry, dry, dry bit as I have composting DL right under my roosts, which also creates humidity and requires some level of moisture to continue to decompose. My mantra is big ventilation, passive air flow from bottom to top, and dry footing. One can have moisture in the bedding and still have dry footing....just got to trap that moisture beneath the top layer of the bedding.

I'm also one of those folks who don't believe in the whole "drafts" bit...I know where there are chickens roosting in trees, on porches, in barn rafters in this subzero weather, with high winds blowing right up their skirts and they aren't getting frostbit one little bit.

So I have a large combed rooster roosting with his head adjacent to 4 in. of ventilation at my roof, along with all his gals. I constructed my coop with intentional large gaps at all levels to let in "drafts" but these ventilation areas are on the north and south sides of the coop, with the prevailing winds coming from west to east all winter long. Occasionally we'll get a wind shift where the wind blows from the southwest and I'll hang a feed sack over the top half of the coop door that is always open to air. What I call a draft and what others consider a draft are two different things....to me, a draft is a direct wind, whereas what others consider a draft I call passive airflow.

 

[aart]

@mobius maybe add some pics to your first post.... of your coop inside and out, showing the ventilation.

Will be interesting to see the data you collect thru the whole winter......
.......along with coop maintenance like adding fresh bedding and removing old bedding and/or poop.
Got a spread sheet going to save data?

 

[Howard E]

I am in the process of putting together a piece on cold weather chickens. One of the resources I'm using is a book I got from BYC member and Publisher Robert P, called "Poultry Production". It was first published in 1961 and the author was a professor of poultry husbandry at University of Illinois.

Anyway, long story short, what Mobius is seeing is pretty much exactly what should happen, as per the book. Chickens do crank out enough heat all by themselves to drive up the temperature in the building enough to lower the relative humidity inside, which helps dry the building out. A chicken's body temp is about 107F +/-, and they shed heat constantly, so the birds do have to eat enough high caloric feed to maintain that level of body temp. The feed is the fuel for their furnace. How it all works is a complex (very complex) interaction of birds and their housing, the latter of which involves balancing ventilation, insulation, plus deep or built up litter, or at least that is what the book says.

I think there is another thread on this topic from Wesley in MN who found his coop at 0F when outside temps were -24F. He has somewhere around 24 birds in his. But he is finding similar results. All good to know!

 

[WesleyBeal]

I am in the process of putting together a piece on cold weather chickens. One of the resources I'm using is a book I got from BYC member and Publisher Robert P, called "Poultry Production". It was first published in 1961 and the author was a professor of poultry husbandry at University of Illinois.

Anyway, long story short, what Mobius is seeing is pretty much exactly what should happen, as per the book. Chickens do crank out enough heat all by themselves to drive up the temperature in the building enough to lower the relative humidity inside, which helps dry the building out. A chicken's body temp is about 107F +/-, and they shed heat constantly, so the birds do have to eat enough high caloric feed to maintain that level of body temp. The feed is the fuel for their furnace. How it all works is a complex (very complex) interaction of birds and their housing, the latter of which involves balancing ventilation, insulation, plus deep or built up litter, or at least that is what the book says.

I think there is another thread on this topic from Wesley in MN who found his coop at 0F when outside temps were -24F. He has somewhere around 24 birds in his. But he is finding similar results. All good to know!

23 hens and 4 roosters.

I've got deep litter at varying depths throughout. I try to move it around so it's deep under the roosts, but shallow around the feed and water. I think it approaches 2 feet in depth under the roosts. Pine shavings, saw dust, and lots of straw.

 

[Beekissed]

23 hens and 4 roosters.

I've got deep litter at varying depths throughout. I try to move it around so it's deep under the roosts, but shallow around the feed and water. I think it approaches 2 feet in depth under the roosts. Pine shavings, saw dust, and lots of straw.

That's how I keep mine as well....at the beginning of the fall season it was around 3 ft deep under the roosts but has since decreased in mass as the materials have decomposed and is now around 1.5-2 ft. deep under there at the middle. It's a more compact mass, while the rest of the coop has DL that is more dry and easily moved around, with less true depth. Each morning some of the dry leaves and such from other parts of the coop are flipped up onto the nightly deposits to cap that moisture and keep dry footing there.

The material under my roosts is comprised of masses of green material from the garden, capped over with leaves and a little dab of straw...lots of leaves.