KiwiMaverick
Chirping
This is my build diary. It will contain pictures, information, and an overview of my coop, my flock, and planned / built upgrades, and hopefully some tasteful humour along the way; This coop will end up slightly overbuilt, but I’m okay with that.
By day I am a mechanical engineering student, with an interest in Agriculture and its systems, both traditional and modern, this coop is basically the manifestation of that. I am building it to house 6 hens, as it is just my dad and I at home at the moment, and I can always upgrade later. This coop will also act as a school project for me, featuring an automatic door using a photoresistor to open ~30 mins after sunrise, and close ~30 mins after sunset. My little part of the country gets into the mid 30’s in summer, low negatives in the winter (Celsius), with humidity also being an issue. With this in mind, the coop is also going to be running a fan to help maintain a lower temperature in the warmer months, and attempt to control humidity when needed. These systems will run off of a 12V solar system controlled by an esp32 microcontroller, eventually encompassing a weather station and automated drip irrigation system for the garden.
The coop itself is based on a Colorado Coop lean to design, and will be made of pallets, I have been lucky enough to have access to unneeded, untreated pallets. I will be making the run mostly out of used 45x45mm farm fence batons, purchasing reclaimed batons when the free ones run out. As we do have stoats, rats, hedgehogs, pūkekos, hawks, feral (and not feral, but also relatively useless) cats and possums, I have opted to buy hardware cloth to keep predators out, and my chooks (and eggs) in.
Stage 1 of the build will be the coop and the run, estimated to take maybe a month or so depending on finances, will be the basic coop, run and water system, no electrical systems, as the door doesn’t have a finalised design yet. Through autumn and winter the sun rises at about 7-7:30am and sets between 6 and 7pm, if not earlier, thus I will be much more able to let the chooks in and out manually.
Stage 2 will be the electrical system, door and fan.
I am starting to ramble a little, so I’ll leave this initial update here. Stay tuned for more if you are interested, next update should be out in the next week or so with some initial build photos.
Thank you for reading my post and your interest, feel free to leave comments or advice.
KiwiMav, out.
By day I am a mechanical engineering student, with an interest in Agriculture and its systems, both traditional and modern, this coop is basically the manifestation of that. I am building it to house 6 hens, as it is just my dad and I at home at the moment, and I can always upgrade later. This coop will also act as a school project for me, featuring an automatic door using a photoresistor to open ~30 mins after sunrise, and close ~30 mins after sunset. My little part of the country gets into the mid 30’s in summer, low negatives in the winter (Celsius), with humidity also being an issue. With this in mind, the coop is also going to be running a fan to help maintain a lower temperature in the warmer months, and attempt to control humidity when needed. These systems will run off of a 12V solar system controlled by an esp32 microcontroller, eventually encompassing a weather station and automated drip irrigation system for the garden.
The coop itself is based on a Colorado Coop lean to design, and will be made of pallets, I have been lucky enough to have access to unneeded, untreated pallets. I will be making the run mostly out of used 45x45mm farm fence batons, purchasing reclaimed batons when the free ones run out. As we do have stoats, rats, hedgehogs, pūkekos, hawks, feral (and not feral, but also relatively useless) cats and possums, I have opted to buy hardware cloth to keep predators out, and my chooks (and eggs) in.
Stage 1 of the build will be the coop and the run, estimated to take maybe a month or so depending on finances, will be the basic coop, run and water system, no electrical systems, as the door doesn’t have a finalised design yet. Through autumn and winter the sun rises at about 7-7:30am and sets between 6 and 7pm, if not earlier, thus I will be much more able to let the chooks in and out manually.
Stage 2 will be the electrical system, door and fan.
I am starting to ramble a little, so I’ll leave this initial update here. Stay tuned for more if you are interested, next update should be out in the next week or so with some initial build photos.
Thank you for reading my post and your interest, feel free to leave comments or advice.
KiwiMav, out.
