How to plan for *COLD*

[Ruckus]

My thought was more in terms of wind than precipitation. A roof will create more-still air in the run, which at like -30, -40 will make a real difference to the chooks.

I see, I'll think about it. Most of the wind hits the north face of the house, and I put the coop on the southeast corner of the house so the house would take most of the wind for the coop.

you need proportionately *more* ventilation yet there's nowhere to let it come in that won't frost the chickens or cause considerable cooling of the coop and frost issues.

I agree, this seems to be the central issue. I'm feeling okay about it though. They are pretty hardy little chickens. It's 0ºF out right now, and they're playing in the snow and pecking at the wire. I'll keep close tabs on them as things go on.

Here are some new photos of the progress. It's about ready for chickens to move in:

The lid doesn't have weather stripping down, but I will foam the entire way around it and make a more official lid-prop.

Here's sort of how much space the heat lamp has. Temporarily held in place by hammer...

Could I put tin foil on the walls behind it to keep heat off the coop and on the chooks? Is 250w overkill for this small of a coop? I could pretty easily change it out for a less intense bulb.

Front door, latched shut. I'll put a pop door on it next.

Front door, open. Foam will seal around this door as well.

 

[chookchick]

Looks like you are really insulating well! I have to agree with the others that the 250 watt bulb will likely cook them. Please at least put a small window in the coop with a thermometer inside, or get a thermometer that has a remote sensor so you can monitor the temperature inside. I think you would be better off with a much smaller bulb, or perhaps none, and some kind of thermostat. That small an area is going to heat up (and cool off) really fast. Good luck!
ETA--I see you are using a heated water bowl--perhaps that will be enough heat--does it have a thermostat?

 

[wombat]

I think a 250w bulb is way too much for such a small area! I would try a 50w and see how that works.

Also - get some straw bales for really cold days. You can stack the bales around the coop for extra insullation, and just pull some straw off the rows of bales as you need it for the run.

I would worry about the ventilation, though. With a coop that small, there's really no place for the moisture to escape, and if you opem up ventillation, the size of the coop will likely leave you with a draft. If you have the coop complete,y enclosed, and start seeing moisture / frost accumulating inside, you're risking frostbite and molds, depending on the temps.

You might want to consider putting a gable roof on that, and soffit vents. You can just leave some openings under the eaves and cover with hardware cloth. Then set up the roosting area below the joists and cover with a slat roof inside so they aren't up in the rafters in the drafty area.

http://www.cornerhardware.com/howto/ht076.html <---- soffit vents look like this, though this pic is obviously for a home and not a coop!

Edit: Can't say I have any experience with Alaska winters, since I grew up in sunny Wisconsin!

 

[Ruckus]

I hear you guys, and I definitely won't be putting chickens out there until I know what to expect from the hardware I've put in. That being said, I'm not entirely convinced that 250w WILL cook them in there, especially with proper ventilation. It's -15ºF as I write this and will be colder tomorrow night. My wife bought a digital thermometer on her way home from work this evening, but it only goes down to 0º, which she didn't realize when she bought it because it seems reasonable to expect that any thermometer sold in AK would read down to at least -40º. Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to test the coop tomorrow night and see how it holds out. I did my best to seal off the leaky cracks in the construction, but it's impossible to find them all and I'm sure I've missed a few.

Chookchick -

Please at least put a small window in the coop with a thermometer inside, or get a thermometer that has a remote sensor so you can monitor the temperature inside. I think you would be better off with a much smaller bulb, or perhaps none, and some kind of thermostat.

A window is a bit outside my budget on this (if the building off a sawed-in-half outhouse and living in a 15x20 cabin are any indicators

), but I will take your advice and start with the regular 100w bulb that "heats" the outhouse right now.

ETA--I see you are using a heated water bowl--perhaps that will be enough heat--does it have a thermostat?

I highly doubt that the bowl would be enough. It's just a regular dog bowl with a 25w engine heating pad siliconed to the bottom of it (with a shallow metal pan below it to give an air buffer between it and whatever). I will try to see if I can find a good outdoor thermostat control for it, as I've seen some references to these in the suggested threads.

Wombat -

get some straw bales for really cold days. You can stack the bales around the coop for extra insullation

A good idea, and one I've started to work on. I got 4 bales of fireweed hay from a friend yesterday, and will be returning for another few bales to complete a bit of a hay igloo around the coop. I consider all days in Fairbanks past October to be those really cold days!

You might want to consider putting a gable roof on that, and soffit vents.

Gable roof? That's not a bad idea! I've put plenty of soffits on lean-to roofs, but it would take some heavy modification to make the existing roof have soffits, and not really worth it if the same could be accomplished with a hole saw and two minutes. I like the idea of gabling the roof, and I will keep it in mind for modifying the coop later, but again, budget and available outside time (it's rapidly getting too cold to stay outside for more than a few hours at a time - I'm already shakin' in my bunny boots!) are prohibitive factors at this point in the year. I think I'll have a better idea in a couple days of how well I've balanced insulation/ventilation.

Thanks for the great ideas guys! Please keep them coming, it's really helpful!

 

[LynneP]

Hi Ruckus, I have to admit I gasped when I saw that heat lamp- I'd be seriously afraid of fire and trapped birds. Any chance of getting the coop into that building and forgetting the lamp?

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Oooo, please don't turn that on (not with the coop lid on, especially).

It may not be too much heat for -60 F nights, but it is *now*, although that does not really matter because there is a pretty good chance that your coop would burn down the first night you used it *anyhow*. REally really, that is a scary proposition, please do not do it; when the manufacturer of the heatlamp says 'keep 18" away from all combustables" they MEAN it.

Put a max-min thermometer in the coop, on the inside of the lid or next to the roost (but not right next to the lamp); try a 40w bulb in the lamp fixture for now. You may well need to work your way up to 100w as the winter deepens, but you don't need that *now*. Get you some more wire and make a guard for the lamp so that chickens cannot lean their combs against the bulb and get burnt (yes, they do that) or bump into it and break it. Or see if you can find some other form of 100-200w heating appliance that is 'non burn' and safe near combustables.

As far as ventilation, the thing is (addressing other peoples' concerns here), if the incoming air is sometimes going to be -40 or -60 F, you just aren't going to be able to *have* much if any ventilation. Although you can, and should, *now*. For the really cold time of year, you are going to have to get around the ventilation issue by raising the coop temperature enough that relative humidity drops to an acceptable level [since warmer air holds more moisture, warming up cold damp air makes it less humid in an operational sense] and rely on cleaning and daily lid-opening to disperse any ammonia buildup.

Remember, bags of leaves or whatnot would really help insulate around the outside of the coop, and decrease the heat wattage it requires.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[wombat]

Gable roof? That's not a bad idea! I've put plenty of soffits on lean-to roofs, but it would take some heavy modification to make the existing roof have soffits, and not really worth it if the same could be accomplished with a hole saw and two minutes. I like the idea of gabling the roof, and I will keep it in mind for modifying the coop later, but again, budget and available outside time (it's rapidly getting too cold to stay outside for more than a few hours at a time - I'm already shakin' in my bunny boots!) are prohibitive factors at this point in the year. I think I'll have a better idea in a couple days of how well I've balanced insulation/ventilation.

You could probably just slant the roof like a lean-to to get some head space over the actual roosting area to allow moisture to rise, and add soffits to get some air flow. The soffits don't need to be fancy, a hole with hardware cloth over it will do it. Might even be better that way than with a gable roof, since the coop is small. I think it would help to have some head space above the roosting area either way ... it's not just opening a hole for ventilation, it's having that ventilation up above where the birds are so that they are below any drafts, but just enough rising warm air escapes to take the moisture with it.

I think you will need to do something along those lines ... Maybe not, if your winter is dry air, you have only a couple birds, and you clean out the litter frequently, but my guess is that you're going to get a lot of moisture because it's so tightly enclosed and such a small space.

Good luck with it, looks like quite the adventure to be living up there.​

 

[Ruckus]

For the sake of posterity, I thought I'd share a little update. We ended up getting a huge snow dump not long after I finished the improvements I showed in the earlier photos. I put the heat lamp in the lower level in the top right corner next to the door, and put the water dish beneath that. I plugged that into one of those extension cords with a metal guarded light fixture built into it, which I simply hung in the top right corner of the back part of the coop (above the ramp to the roost). Since the chickens didn't really use the ramp and preferred to hop up and down from the roost, having the light there didn't seem to be much danger. I started off the winter switching between just the heat lamp or just the 100w lightbulb. Once it got ferociously cold, I started to leave them both on. I left a thermometer up in the roost, and according to it, I managed to keep it at at least 20 above inside at all times. There were a couple days when the temps got down below -50ºF that we put them in the dog kennel and brought them inside for the day. Despite careful planning and watchfulness, I couldn't prevent unreasonable behavior on one of my chicken's part, and she would go out in the run at night sometimes. A couple times I went out to plug in my car before heading to bed and would notice she had bedded down under the porch for some reason (even though it was -20 or something awful). She ended up getting mildly frostbit, but now that the weather is cheering up, it seems to be healing nicely. When I needed better ventilation, I could prop the lid of the roost open a little with a 2x4, which created pretty great airflow through the coop, and if the day got really nice, I'd just pop the front door open entirely. The girls produced well through the winter, getting about 1 egg a day between the two of them (no doubt due to the amount of light they had in the coop, although I find they often sleep well regardless of the lighting conditions, for example, it's bright almost all the time now, and they go to sleep at 5 pm). I don't like that they were probably stressed out by the light, but I didn't really have a choice if I wanted to keep them alive in there. :\\

Anyway, I'm not under any illusion that this is particularly interesting to anyone, but in case anyone comes looking for answers on handling Alaskan winter temps on a tight budget, I thought I'd share the end of my story. Thanks for all the helpful suggestions again!

 

[patandchickens]

Actually I'm really glad you posted this update!! I actually *have* wondered about you once or twice this winter (well ok, maybe only once LOL) and it is very interesting to hear how things went

Sounds like you have things working pretty well. I know you'd rather have not had the frostbite, but I am impressed that you can keep just 2 chickens outside *at all* in your part of Alaska, so I think you get major "technical difficulty" points for that

THanks for posting, hope your summer goes well,

Pat

 

[B'villechicken]

I too am glad you updated us. The experiences that you've had are extreme but the roots of heat-vent-moisture control are ones that everyone has to deal with. I'm glad things worked out well. Good luck and thanks for the update

David