hangin'witthepeeps :
I can understand that it is better to insulate a coop in Northern climates, but what about southern? Here in my neck of the wood around Athens, GA we do have a winter, usually low 20's occasional teens, but only a few days at a time and only for about 2 or 3 months. So, how does insulation keep a coop cooler? I just can't wrap my mind around that one.
Yeap, people do SAY that, but only by (usually quite inaccurate) analogy to houses. Insulation will not keep your coop cooler in hot-climate summers, except under two very specific cases:
1) if you are actually air-conditioning your coop, or putting some other source of coolth INTO the coop during the day such as fanning air from a cold basement, then yes, insulating the coop will help keep it cooler all day.
or
2) if your coop is really QUITE large and has LARGE thermal mass -- a good example would be a slab-floored or earth-bermed structure of fair size, such as garage-sized or bigger -- so that it is being continually cooled by the exposure of that thermal mass (which has cooled over winter, and has further access to underground earth/rock as a heat sink), then insulating can likewise help keep the coop cooler. At least for however much of the summer the cool thermal mass remains cool.
In any other situation, THE COOLEST YOUR COOP WILL EVER BE IS OUTDOOR SHADE TEMPERATURE, and insulation WILL NOT change this basic fact; indeed in many cases it can make your coop hotter longer. This is because a typical backyard coop, esp. a smallish one, just does not "capture enough nighttime coolth", so to speak, to last for more than a few hours into the morning, which is not the hot time of day anyhow. There just is not much of a timelag in how the coop tracks outdoor temperatures. Thus, insulation will at best buy you a few hours of a few degrees cooler; big fat hairy deal. Furthermore, insulation will only even do THAT if you have little or no air exchange, and unless that situation is corrected *as soon as* the coop equals or starts to exceed outdoor air temps (coops in the sun do tend to exceed outdoor temps at midday), your insulation is actually making the coop HOTTER most of the time.
No, wait, I can think of one other exception:
3) if you have a wall or ceiling/roof that really bake in the sun and you can just FEEL the heat radiating off them inside the coop. In that case, insulation will help some. However, so would greater ventilation e.g. having several or all walls of the structure be all-mesh; and those are really kind of more effective and all-round-useful measures to take, IMO. Although if you have a largely-open-air coop and heat radiating off a hot wall or roof is STILL a problem, by all means slap some insulation in there.
But for most hot-climate situations, open-air-ness is really probably more often your friend than insulation is.
JME (more with horse barns and sheds than with coops, but I have lived in places with sort of hottish summers e.g. NC),
Pat
I can understand that it is better to insulate a coop in Northern climates, but what about southern? Here in my neck of the wood around Athens, GA we do have a winter, usually low 20's occasional teens, but only a few days at a time and only for about 2 or 3 months. So, how does insulation keep a coop cooler? I just can't wrap my mind around that one.
Yeap, people do SAY that, but only by (usually quite inaccurate) analogy to houses. Insulation will not keep your coop cooler in hot-climate summers, except under two very specific cases:
1) if you are actually air-conditioning your coop, or putting some other source of coolth INTO the coop during the day such as fanning air from a cold basement, then yes, insulating the coop will help keep it cooler all day.
or
2) if your coop is really QUITE large and has LARGE thermal mass -- a good example would be a slab-floored or earth-bermed structure of fair size, such as garage-sized or bigger -- so that it is being continually cooled by the exposure of that thermal mass (which has cooled over winter, and has further access to underground earth/rock as a heat sink), then insulating can likewise help keep the coop cooler. At least for however much of the summer the cool thermal mass remains cool.
In any other situation, THE COOLEST YOUR COOP WILL EVER BE IS OUTDOOR SHADE TEMPERATURE, and insulation WILL NOT change this basic fact; indeed in many cases it can make your coop hotter longer. This is because a typical backyard coop, esp. a smallish one, just does not "capture enough nighttime coolth", so to speak, to last for more than a few hours into the morning, which is not the hot time of day anyhow. There just is not much of a timelag in how the coop tracks outdoor temperatures. Thus, insulation will at best buy you a few hours of a few degrees cooler; big fat hairy deal. Furthermore, insulation will only even do THAT if you have little or no air exchange, and unless that situation is corrected *as soon as* the coop equals or starts to exceed outdoor air temps (coops in the sun do tend to exceed outdoor temps at midday), your insulation is actually making the coop HOTTER most of the time.
No, wait, I can think of one other exception:
3) if you have a wall or ceiling/roof that really bake in the sun and you can just FEEL the heat radiating off them inside the coop. In that case, insulation will help some. However, so would greater ventilation e.g. having several or all walls of the structure be all-mesh; and those are really kind of more effective and all-round-useful measures to take, IMO. Although if you have a largely-open-air coop and heat radiating off a hot wall or roof is STILL a problem, by all means slap some insulation in there.
But for most hot-climate situations, open-air-ness is really probably more often your friend than insulation is.
JME (more with horse barns and sheds than with coops, but I have lived in places with sort of hottish summers e.g. NC),
Pat
