I cannot tell you how many people told me I was nutso for wanting to use sand. "Use pine shavings!" they said. "You'll kill your chickens!" they hollered. So, for the first several weeks our chickens had been living in their coop after moving from the brooder, I used pine shavings. I have no place to compost them because we are in only a suburban backyard, so I sat there and scooped them laboriously into garbage bags once a week because the smell was um...*bad.* Then finally I got fed up, put my big girl panties on, and said "to hell with the naysayers, I'm going to do what my brain tells me is best," and cleaned out all the shavings. I threw a 50# bag of play sand in there, threw a few scoops of Sweet PDZ and diatomaceous earth on top, mixed it around and VOI-FREAKIN-LA, it works like a charm! NO, and I mean ZERO smell for three weeks! The poop is so dried out from the mixture of stuff in there that it has no moisture building up at all in that coop and we are in south Louisiana so humidity is a huge issue. I use an old pool skimmer net to sift the nice, dry and non-smelly poop out. The pool skimmer works like a charm because it gets even the smaller poopies out (which a kitty litter scoop couldn't do), lets the Sweet PDZ out with the sand, and comes on a nice long pole for reaching the back of the coop. I just brush the sand into a big pile on one side of our 3x6' coop (with an old pool brush, lol) and sift through it quickly with the skimmer net. Then I dump the dessicated poops into an old Home Depot bucket and stick it into the corner of the yard to compost to use in the garden. (Just so you know, I was told I was an idiot for wanting to use a pool skimmer to sift the poop out too. I must be a closet genius, I guess.) The moral of my story: Do what your common sense tells you. You might just be a closet genius too.
