Get Ready for Winter

[CapricornFarm]

LOL... Love the ideas... Hi Cap

I am in San Diego My place is in the High desert east of here... LOL and Yes we get winter @Latitude33 ... My place is in Southern Southern California about two miles from Mexico and at about 4000 feet.

Twelve inches of precipitaion is a good year.... Ours comes in the form of left overs from Monsoons that are heading to Arizona... and Snow in the winter. I will grant you we only get about 72 hours total of snow... it sticks sometimes for over night..

but the rest of the time its wind.... We are talking picking up ANYTHING not tied down and removing it wind. The screens on the house will howl so loud its hard to talk on the phone.

I am doing a rebuild on my coop once I get back upt there... but I have always used tarps year round. In the summer for shade in the winter for what ever precipitation for the elements... I use the heavy ones that are brown on one side and silver on the other.

Sooo right about using bungees... My tarps last two seasons... the other conisideration is to NOT have any pokie bits under the tarps... that will cause wear points. What the Bungees do is allow flex of the attach points so the tarp can move just a bit with the wind.

I also toss a rope over the whole thing making a big X criss crossing to limit the amount of '"Poof" the tarp does. My coop has only two solid walls... One full wall on the prevailing wind side and a half wall for when it switches and comes from the other direction. All open sides have drop down tarps for those days when its very cold...

The waterers do freeze over night but I use black water tubs. they hold about four gallons of water automatically filled by a sock tank float. I just dump them over the ice comes out and they refill.

Horse and goats can crack their own ice.... and do a very good job of it too. 100 gallons for the horse and 80 gallons for the goats.

I build a goat Igloo out of straw bales for winter.... EVERY one loves that both goats and chickens.

My new coop will be more of a Poultry house slash barn to house goats and poultry and store feed for each and for the very first time will have a solid roof. Still no side walls except for one and drop down tarps for bad weather.

deb

Hi Deb! Says one Deb to another!
Wow, sounds like a challenging place to live! My goats never broke ice on the water that i know of. Maybe they were just waiting for me to do it. I carried a hammer and a strainer in the Mule to take care of breaking and removing ice. Eventually i got floating stock tank heaters and had extension cords eveywhere. Hoping to avoid that here.

 

[microchick]

@Capricornfarm, great build going on. It vaguely reminds me of a solar kiln that we saw at an Amish sawmill some years ago. They employed the clear roofing panels on the wall instead of glass and then lined the opposite wall with the thermal panels of Styrofoam that have aluminum foil on one side. The solar heating only had radiant heating during daylight hours but it got really warm in that room. Warm enough to cure wood for cabinet making.

DH and I were looking at your build and he came up with an idea to pass along. Any way you could add some rocks or bricks to the construction that will hold radiant energy along with the composting energy being provided by the manure?

Also, unless I missed it,how deep are you going for your manure pit? Are you going to have it deep enough or big enough to be efficient? What is going to stop the radiant heat from the manure from escaping through the soil on the sides and bottom? Leaching, I think is the term?

I do think you are on the right road here. We have a thick concrete floor in our shop with large windows on the southern exposure. That floor keeps the shop cool in the summer and warm (seldom freezes in the shop. In fact I winter plants in it) in the winter. Radiant heating does work.

 

[CapricornFarm]

@Capricornfarm, great build going on. It vaguely reminds me of a solar kiln that we saw at an Amish sawmill some years ago. They employed the clear roofing panels on the wall instead of glass and then lined the opposite wall with the thermal panels of Styrofoam that have aluminum foil on one side. The solar heating only had radiant heating during daylight hours but it got really warm in that room. Warm enough to cure wood for cabinet making.

DH and I were looking at your build and he came up with an idea to pass along. Any way you could add some rocks or bricks to the construction that will hold radiant energy along with the composting energy being provided by the manure?

Also, unless I missed it,how deep are you going for your manure pit? Are you going to have it deep enough or big enough to be efficient? What is going to stop the radiant heat from the manure from escaping through the soil on the sides and bottom? Leaching, I think is the term?

I do think you are on the right road here. We have a thick concrete floor in our shop with large windows on the southern exposure. That floor keeps the shop cool in the summer and warm (seldom freezes in the shop. In fact I winter plants in it) in the winter. Radiant heating does work.

That is an interesting idea. I will think on it. Maybe put a layer of bricks where the chickens come in. But i will need to clean them , maybe rotate them. Not much room left in there once you add the waterer and the window box.
The manure is going to be in a dish pan with Styrofoam around it so no heat lost that way. Easier to turn the manure with this method.
Thanks for your feedback, Micro!

 

[microchick]

My pleasure.

My main concern on the build is the amount of composted manure that you are going to be using. I've noticed with our compost pile that you don't hit steam until you get about a foot into it. So I'll be watching with interest how using a dishpan full works.

Our winters here are much colder and icier than I think yours are. If I did something like this I would have to definitely have to use a different or larger source of back up heat.

As for being ready for winter, outside of finding a source for heating water for my two smaller coops, I'm as ready as I'm going to be. I bought two suckion cup aquarium heaters on ebay with the thought of going that route but when I tested one of them it came loose from the bottom of the container I was using, floated from the top and broke. So now I'm hesitatn about using the second one.

I use a heated dog dish in my main coop. The only place I have accessible electricity for the coop is inside the coop proper so the bowl is inside. The temp in the coop never goes below freezing even in the depth of winter and it has proven to be an effective way to keep water unfrozen so maybe I will have to get another for the two smaller coops to share.

 

[perchie.girl]

Ice here never gets more than a quarter inch thick by the time the sun comes out its half way gone... it forms in the night... during the day in winter it will be in the low fifties.... At night its gotten as low as 5 degrees.... Jet stream swooped down to do that one... broke pipes in my green house.

deb

 

[CapricornFarm]

Today i cut boards and painted them for the last side of the solar cage. And assembled the platform for the waterer. Oh heck, i need to get a picture!

 

[aart]

Got the last of the outer windows cleaned and all cleated shut for winter....
...NOW I can say 100%.

 

[CapricornFarm]

Great Aart! Not 100% ready, still lots of bulbs to plant. But getting there.
Here is my platform with the waterer and the poo pan.

 

[microchick]

I thought I was about 100% then remembered I need to block off the vent windows on the north side of the bantam coop. I'm thinking if I cut some Koroplast to size (the vents are about 8X12 at the very top of the wall), punch some holes in it for ventilation, I can fit them in the windows, still get some ventilation from them and keep any big drafts off the birds.

We had a couple of cold nights and I just shoved some plastic in the window sills.I went to open up the coop to the sound of Chaos and went in to discover that somehow they had pulled out the plastic and chickens being chickens, they were going postal, flapping around, making the plastic flap around making them flap around.

Sometimes they are just so silly stupid......

 

[CapricornFarm]

I thought I was about 100% then remembered I need to block off the vent windows on the north side of the bantam coop. I'm thinking if I cut some Koroplast to size (the vents are about 8X12 at the very top of the wall), punch some holes in it for ventilation, I can fit them in the windows, still get some ventilation from them and keep any big drafts off the birds.

We had a couple of cold nights and I just shoved some plastic in the window sills.I went to open up the coop to the sound of Chaos and went in to discover that somehow they had pulled out the plastic and chickens being chickens, they were going postal, flapping around, making the plastic flap around making them flap around.

Sometimes they are just so silly stupid......

Oh yeah, i was in the hoop coop with the guineas today and i climbed the ladder to check on the solar light and they totally freaked out. Normally i can stand right next to them.