Heat lamp alternatives needed.

[JustAnotherWeirdo]

anywhere between 30-70 chicks at a time but I am downscaling this year so let’s say 40 chicks between 1-6 weeks old (my pekin babies can take up to 8 to be feathered enough to stay outside) but ideally of course I’d like to have 2-3 brooders set up instead of 1 this year. Currently the weather is at a low of 10°C at night and between 22-30°C during the day and later on in the season it quite consistently reaches a low of 20°C. This season I’d prefer to have multiple brooders so I’m not keeping newly hatched chicks and 6-8 week olds in the same brooder which is not ideal or the safest but it worked fine mostly due to the different heat requirements of the ages, tinier chicks stayed closer to the lamp and larger chicks further away or completely not under it if the weather was warm enough.

How many chicks and what temperatures are you dealing with? "Quite a lot" does not help with scale.

The more chicks you have the better and easier they keep warm of course, however I’d like something that could work with both 10 or 40 newly hatched chicks and with older chicks too that are nearly ready to go stay outside but just need another week of feather growth still

Your suggestion is a completely new one I’ve never heard of and it might work, however it doesn’t seem quite as adjustable as a heat lamp with varying temperatures underneath it or a brooder plate you’ve set up to be much lower on the one end than the other, but perhaps it could be if you did with it exactly what I just said about the brooder plate.

 

[JustAnotherWeirdo]

I see the rest of my message didn’t send so I’m retyping it now.

I quite like the idea of the seed mats and pinning them up kind of diagonally so there’s different heat intensities for the chicks to choose which I think that could work pretty well!! However this is my first time hearing of a seed mats but I remember seeing aluminium heating pads made for reptiles which should work as well and pretty similarly right?