I've been meaning to do an article on brooders for a while but never got around to it. This is a brooder I've used since 2007. I've made fancier brooders since then but they've never worked as well as this old simple one. As you can tell from the pictures, there is not much to it. It's an old freezer with the lid replaced with a chicken wire cover. The heat lamp is currently attached with bailing twine, in the past I've used wire but it doesn't really matter. I've used this brooder every month of the year from -20F to 100+F. Depending on the outdoor temperature the heat lamp can be raised or lowered and fitted with a 125 or 250 watt bulb. In the winter I just lay a thick blanket over the top of the cover to keep the heat in. I do weekly hatches and use this as a first stage brooder. Every week new chicks come directly from the hatcher and each week chicks that have been in the brooder for two to three weeks are moved to a second stage brooder. I top it off with a bit of fresh bedding every week before the new chicks are added, by the end of a hatching season there's about 10 inches of material at the bottom. Then I just shovel it out and put in a fresh layer of shavings and grass clippings like you see in the pictures. As you can probably tell, the brooder never gets thoroughly cleaned or sanitized, but if you're someone who believes in that the freezer walls would probably make it easy to do that.
