It's a heck of a lot safer than a heat lamp around shavings! Think about this - even on high you can touch a heating pad. It's DESIGNED to come into contact with things. Touch a heat lamp. Yeah. The heating pad is just above the chicks' backs. It warms them by contact. It doesn't warm their entire environment. A lamp heats the walls, the brooder, the waterer, the floors - everything around it. The chicks need cool...but a heat lamp heats their entire area. It might have a cool spot way away from the heater, but in most cases that's only a couple of degrees cooler. With a heating pad, if the brooder is outside (like mine) the temperature in the brooder is the same as where it's located.....the chicks know where the heat is and duck under it for only 3 reasons - a quick warm up, security if they get spooked, and to go to sleep at night, just exactly like they would with a broody hen. One of their favorite things to do is to sit on top and watch the world go by, again just like they do with a broody hen. The rest of the time they are out exploring, learning to be chickens, and feathering. My heating pad this year was on for almost 3 months steady, being used on various batches of chicks. Yep. Some of this year's chicks out in the brooder. It was 38 degrees and raining. You will hear me refer to one little chick that "died". She'd found a small gap that we overlooked and when we found her in the main run, she was cold, stiff, neck and feet extended. We fixed that gap immediately then I picked her little body up to dispose of it. But there was a little something, and I knew she wasn't dead yet. I brought her in and stuck her in the incubator with the eggs while hubby Ken prepared a heating pad nest for her. Today she is a big, beautiful White Orpington pullet giving me nice brown eggs. I had put her back out with the others the same day she recovered, and this was filmed the very next day. I could probably have revived her with a heat lamp too, but her heating pad nest was dark and soft and cuddly.
