For those of you that have a light in the coop...

[Chickengirl1304]

How many hours do you give your hens? I have mine come on At 3am so they get about 14 hours but only half of them are laying and their moult is definetly over by now. Im thinking of setting it to come on at 130 to give them about 15 1/2 hours of light

 

[LukensFarms]

I leave a light on indirectly 24/7. Partly for predator control as well. Make sure they have high protein and essential vitamins.

 

[Kidhenduckohmy]

It gets dark around 4:00-4:30. I have the light on a timer from 2:00am to 10:00pm. We have 14 chickens and get between 9 to 14 eggs a day.

 

[lauriemae15]

We have our light on so they have a total of 12 hours of light a day.

 

[lahowardjr]

I just started 0430 to 1800 hrs. lighting Friday. Without light, I've been getting a egg a day out of fourteen nine month old hens. We'll see how thirteen and a half hours improve my egg production.

 

[lbrtyldy]

We have ours on a timer - goes on at 5:30 - 7:15 AM and then 4:30 - 8 PM to give 14.5 hours of light.

Read that they need 14 to lay so figured we've give them a little more to try to keep production up.

 

[WalkingOnSunshine]

We have added light in the evening, light in the morning, and light both morning and evening.

Without a doubt, we get more eggs just adding light in the morning. It seems that the light in the morning wakes them up and gets them moving and eating early, but light at night doesn't really do much for them. They still went to bed at the same time, whether there was light in the evening or not.

We have our light on a timer to come on at 4am and go off at 8am, which is dawn this time of year. They only need that bit of light, since the rest of the time it's daylight and that counts toward those 14 hours of light.

I strongly recommend against light all night. Every animal needs a dark period. Without it, it's a source of stress, can cause pecking, and might even decrease laying. My family has a largeish dairy farm, and there's a lot of research that shows that cows must have a dark period to reduce stress and give more milk. It's a pain to the humans, who need to do the night work with headlamps, but the cows get their dark.

We are getting 41-48 eggs a day from 50+ hens (I don't know exactly how many)

 

[debid]

You didn't say how long ago you set up your light. That's important to consider because it is a build up of hormones in response to light hours that causes laying to resume and some take a little longer than others to build up. I'm using 40W coming on at 3AM. It took 3 1/2 weeks for all of them to resume. Some started at one week, others at 2, and the last at 3 1/2. Now, I get 5-6 eggs per day from 6 hens which is what I was getting when they were peak-production pullets so they're in full bloom with 14 hours. It really should be enough.