1 Week in the coop and the Poop-slide is working GREAT!

[Daox13]

I am in the process of designing a coop for my three girls. They are right now sadly confined to a tractor with a mobile run. SO I am going to make a 6x6 coop with a few roosts and I am not going to install a poop shoot. I think I will also expand the idea since I am gong to have a rain barrel right by the coop to have a small hose at the top of the coop and when ready to clean just turn a valve and let some water come down and wash all extra away... has any tried this method?
I will install rails to make sure the water ends up in the container instead of the floor.

 

[aart]

Funny when old threads pop up.
I'm curious how this worked after the first few weeks.
......and really curious...did you really use a vacuum cleaner to suck up the poop out of the tote lid?
Can you update @Hummingbird Hollow ?

 

[Hummingbird Hollow]

Funny when old threads pop up.
I'm curious how this worked after the first few weeks.
......and really curious...did you really use a vacuum cleaner to suck up the poop out of the tote lid?
Can you update @Hummingbird Hollow ?

The poop slide worked really well for about three years. I removed the whole tote lid and dumped it in the compost bin on a regular basis and it contained a large percentage of the poop released during the nights on the roost. Unfortunately, the plastic I used to compose the slide didn't stand up to numerous washings and overtime it lost its rigidity and sort of slumped. I need to build a new one out of a solid piece of board and then coat it with something like plastic so that it hoses off easily during my twice annual complete muck out and scrub.

I guess I used the shop vac for the first few times I cleaned the coop but stopped when the shop vac stopped working. We never replaced it. I don't know if cleaning the coop was the reason it stopped working but I doubt it. We used it pretty hard for years.

 

[aart]

Quote: Thanks HH.
The corrugated plastic is pretty slick(haha!) but yes, lacks structural integrity and would definitely need to be backed and/or supported with something stiffer.

 

[Mobleymoon]

I want to thank the folks who posted the thread a few weeks back about their poop-slides and poop-hammocks. I moved my 7 week old pullets out to their coop 8 nights ago and want to report that the poop-slide I created (with inspiration from this forum) is working very well. The first few nights more than half of the girls roosted up on the shelf I built over the nesting boxes, but because I had anticipated that, I had covered it with sheets of corrugated plastic, which is very easy to clean. Since then, they have been roosting on the roosts (braving higher roosts each night) with the poop-slide under them and all the poop has slid down into the Rubbermaid lid at the bottom of the slide. Yesterday I did my first coop cleaning and it took about 45 seconds with the shop vac to suck up what was in the lid and on the shelf, which took care of probably 90% of all the poop deposited in the coop in the past week. (Here in Colorado the air temp is dry enough that the poop vacumes up easily and cleanly and I can just empty the shop vac into the compost bin).

My poop slide is made of two 1"X1" pieces of wood with pieces of corrugated plastic (left over from a different project) attached to them. It hangs with hook & eyes about 6 or 7 inches under the roosts with the bottom resting on the edge of a lid to a big Rubbermaid tub that I no longer have (found the lid while I was clearing the space for the coop and scooped it back out of the trash can before trash day). While this week I simply vacumed, it will be very easy to remove both the poop slide and the lid to hose them off if and when the need arises.

Hello! I love this hack. Its been a while now, hows it working for you over time? I currently use grain bags stapled to a back wall , along the bottom of the roost supports. Useing a plaster scraper works great, but a slide would be so much easyer. I have 1-3yr old hen, her 6 -1 yr olds, and now 4 - 8 wk old. The 4 babies are working their way up to the big girls roost. I can tell by the poop where they sleep even if they start in the org hatching box. There has got to be a better way to manage poop. I like the slide idea, but going up is not my option. Its a long, like maybe 12 ft on top of 6 nesting box3s on top of another 12 nesting boxes, a foot of the ground. I moved INTO the house that had this 12 x 8 x 8 to 10 (roof pitch). It not bad really the hens use the open boxes at the ends and the roos (2) look like book ends. Thanks for the idea!