How many chickens you have is important, the more you have the more poop you have to manage, but moisture is the real key to keeping smell down. How water-tight is that deck? Will water leak through to the coop? How does the water drain off the deck? If it stands you will either rot the deck or coop top or it can leak through a flat roof. Wet poop is going to smell.
It can be done, some people do, but look at your drainage and how you would keep it dry.
How often you have to clean it will depend on your standards of clean, how many chickens you have, how the coop is built, and how you manage them. Some people clean something daily, I’d guess most people on here follow something close to Sunflour’s schedule, some of us clean a lot less often.
One way to make that a lot easier and extend the life of your bedding is to use droppings boards. There are many different ways to do this but they are basically something under the roosts to catch the poop so you can remove it from the coop and keep the total volume of poop down in there. Some people use boards or trays, with or without something in it to absorb the moisture. Some use bins like you can get at
Walmart to sit under the roosts. You’ll find we do all these things so many different ways that it creates a problem for you. You have so many options to choose from it’s hard to decide which one to go with.
Chickens poop a lot all the time but they are not moving around at night, plus during the day they are probably not going to be in the coop much. Since they are not moving around, the poop really builds up in volume under the roosts. That can create a small problem but also concentrates it so you can remove it.
Welcome to the forum. Glad you found us.
