How do I help my chickens in Excessive HEAT?

[Barry Natchitoches]

Quote:
I have SEVEN fans inside a 13 foot by 7 1/2 foot area. Six are up on top of the 6 foot by 3 foot by 2 1/2 feet high plywood "room" that we built inside the pen for them to lay in, so yes, they are off the ground.


At the beginning of the year, my 13 henhouse residents were scared of that first fan I put up there.


HOWEVER, as it got hotter, they not only got used to the first fan, but they have welcomed the addition of more fans. Late this afternoon (with the outdoor temp at 104), I added fan number 7. There was no more room on top of the nesting area with the six fans already up there, so I had to put the latest fan down on the ground, pointed at their favorite waterer. They just looked up from where they were, panting, with gratefulness in their eyes.


Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go cut up a homegrown watermelon for my chickens...

 

[Barry Natchitoches]

Quote:
I have both high quality metal fans (the two most expensive costing over $100 bux) and low quality plastic fans cooling my chickens right now. I have chickens in both the chicken tractor and the main henhouse to keep cool, so I'm using every fan I can get my grubby little paws on right now.


I will assure you -- the cost of the fan has alot to do with how good of a job it does cooling the chickens. The $100 metal fans (one given to the henhouse birds, one to the birds in the tractor) cool the best by far. The three $40 metal fans do a pretty good job, as do the two "squirrel cage" high velocity fans we bought for about $49 each at WalMart early in the season. The cheap Lasko box fans, with their plastic blades (cost about $13 at WalMart) do not circulate any where near as much as these other fans do. Oddly enough, the 9 inch fan that we bought for $14 at WalMart (which we stick up on top of a 2 gallon bucket) actually circulates more air than the 18 inch plastic Lasko box fans.


One other interesting thing: two of our fans are outdoors, used to cool the screened chicken tractor "porch" from the outside. One is one of those $100 expensive fans from Northern Tools. The other is a cheap $13 Lasko box fan from Wal Mart.


We don't purposefully leave them running in the rain, but rain has hit suddenly while we were not at home (or else sleeping in the night), and we have found that if we do NOT turn the fans off while they are wet, that they will keep on working just fine despite being left out in bad rainstorms.


I don't recommend that you try that yourself. I'm just telling you what we have found when we have accidentally left the fans out in the pouring rain.

 

[Boo-Boo's Mama]

I use gallon milk jugs, juice bottles, 1 liter club soda and 22 oz soft drink bottles...freeze these daily...use my TSC yard wagon to haul them to the chicken run each day.

Four juice bottles go in the cat litter bucket waterer to chill the water, one of the 1 ltr soda bottles is hung on the side of a hutch in the run--as it melts they drink from it, gallon milk jugs go in 2 rabbit hutches and in Rubbermaid containers turned on their side in the chicken run...the hens love these...they get in with the bottles, other bottles are used in more Rubbermaid containers on their sides...the girls sit on the bottles...put some on top of the Rubbermaid feed box where they sit on these, too. When the day is done, I empty all the bottles on the sand in their run so that the sand is damp the next day. The girls love the damp sand; dig holes to sit and chill!

I have a fan going 24/7.

 

[khrisilu]

Try watering down the outside of the coop and the inside of the holding pen. It helps for a little while. It's very concerning watching the poor things pant and knowing they are so hot. Can you move the tractor into the shade?

 

[ChicKat]

Thank you all the posters here.


I am just now thinking of how to deal with the heat. We had our first 102-degree day before yesterday.

Because I'm new to chickens---and we have excessive heat no matter how you look at it -- I have as much shade as possible...but of all the ideas here that will help me the most---I think the frozen gallon milk jugs... I can perhaps rotate them into the run through out the day -- as one melts replace with a new frozen one.....

Read today that if the temperature is 104 degrees the chicken cannot expell heat fast enough to survive...and 104 is just around the corner I'm afraid.

 

[harveyhorses]

My girls are coping so far, but there was a really nice pine tree that gave shade in the afternoon, that is dead. Really most completely dead. So now their coop is getting the full brunt of the late sun. I have planted vines to help, but they are slow growing, and I had to work them around the electric fence. the roof of their run is A frame and keeps a fairly nice breeze, but now their feeding and water place just roasts. I got a big crate from work, and have made a three sided 'run in' that their food and water stays in and stays in the shade. It's working so far, but is there a drawback I have not foreseen? Also looking into a solar fan.


It's only 94 now, but I took a couple of frozen liter water bottles for them, and they were in the shadiest places they could find, very interested in the bottles.

 

[flowergirl60]

Looks like we all are doing the best we can and will have to wait and see what the dreaded summer heat will do. I hate to think about July and August.

 

[ChooksChick]

There's a Heat and Your Chickens post on my BYC page. I keep mine cool using a bunch of different methods and letting them choose what they like most.

 

[IttyBiddy]

We set up a misting unit to our water hose and put it on a timer. It's working pretty good and our chickens (10) aren't afraid of the mist. They actually take turns walking thru the mist. Their run does not get soggy wet and they love the damp soil. Works for us!

 

[grauerholzfarm]

Hey


I might be new to this chicken thing but I got an idea! I have two old Sal sheds that I have converted into two coops with a huge pen around it. ( I would let them Free Range but I don't want diseases to be passed from the chickens to our hogs... It's our income. )

The sheds have the inclosed area then like a patio with a roof over it .... They are facing south so in the summer they get some breeze naturally and in the winter they are protected .. (I'm in Kansas) So .. I have two window areas with get covered in screen for the summer.
Still wasn't cooling them off... so I put up 3 old bed sheets dipped in Ice cold water and hung them up with a fan by them. This will create a cool breeze and also create more shade.


If you have a run I would put the sheet on the west side when it's the hottest.


Good Luck! I've already lost one so I hope it works!