Insulation...walls and ceiling??? for the Northeast

[patandchickens]

Quote:
The general wisdom in horse-barns, and I can't think why it wouldn't apply to coops as well, is that you gots to keep the mice from being esily able to get TO the insulation. That means each insulation cavity (is that a term? probably not. you know what I mean though) has to be pretty tightly framed with studs (or whatever) all around the 4 sides, no gaps or significant cracks, and your exterior and interior siding on the cavity has to fit equally tight.

It is not a guarantee since of course mice can chew their way thru wood and plywood and panelling and all that, but if you don't provide them with a readymade door, they tend not to get the idea into their heads and you're usually relatively ok.

The other thing often done in insulated horse barns is to do the ceilings with relatively thin rigid insulation board and leave it totally exposed... it does seem to be mouseproof, presumably because the mice can never really tunnel 'inside' it and hide in it. I am not sure this would have any use in coops however, except possibly for ceilings, and I think a number of the rigid board insulations are not really *supposed* to be left exposed because of fire and toxic-smoke hazards, dunno.

Mainly I htink you need more good mousing cats

Good luck,

Pat

 

[mrspie]

Quote:
Are you suuuuure about that, like with numbers and all?

Yes, I am. The reason you don't see houses dripping moisture all the time is that they actually handle the moisture, rather than allowing it to condense all over the place. Humans output a huge amount of moisture from respiration, bathing, and cooking, and unless the house is well-ventilated, that moisture fills up the house quickly.

Which is why the first recommendation when you have a condensation problem is ventilation.

Chickens put out huge amounts of moisture -- practically all the water a chicken drinks comes right back out with poo and breath, and each chicken drinks between a cup and a liter per day, and in a 'snug' sized coop it's going into a pretty small volume of air.

Humans create a huge amount of humidity every day. But let me address the volume issue. Volume matters only if you do not ventilate. An unventilated small volume will fill up with moisture fast -- the steamy shower in a small bathroom. Heating the air of a house allows the air to hold more moisture, but it will hold it only until it gets to a cold surface, where it will condense (think ice forming on the inside of windows in the winter).

If you ventilate the space, like running the fan or (please tell me you don't do this) just opening the door and letting all that moisture into the rest of your space, you will remove the excessive moisture and there will be no condensation problems in the space.

The frequency of the input doesn't matter: the system is designed to meet the maximum expected normal load. If a bathroom can deal with the moisture from one hot shower, it can handle the theoretical condition of somebody staying in the shower for the rest of the life of the house.

If your bathroom is always literally dripping with condensation after you shower, then oh, boy do you have a problem. If you remove condensation by opening the door and letting the moisture fill the rest of your house, I hope that's because you have a dry air problem and are trying to humidify. I've seen a lot of houses where the hallway outside the main bathroom is loaded with black mold because the hot wet air comes out and condenses instantly. It's gross.

I can tell you that I have never seen an aboveground house with its inside walls dripping with condensation except if we're talking kitchen or shower during high steam-production moments. (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it sure would be rare).

Whereas it is not uncommon to go into an insufficiently ventilated and perhaps slightly overstocked livestock barn, including chicken coops, in the wintertime and have droplets of water coating the walls and sometimes ceiling and other surfaces.

Yes, that is what I said. Houses are generally designed to handle moisture in the air better than chicken coops or any other farm building. Building codes were designed to keep moisture from being a major problem in houses, so if you look at how houses are constructed, you can get some ideas for reducing moisture in outbuildings.

I'm a bit unclear here: do you think it's fine to have moisture dripping all over your chickens? If so, leave the space uninsulated and ignore the idea of vapor barriers.

The point of the vapor barrier is to keep hot, moist air from going into the insulation and condensing, creating pockets of moisture held against the material of the walls and causing rot. Periods of being wet and then drying are what rots wood. So using your walls as a moisture buffer of sorts is fine as long as you don't mind replacing the walls regularly.

Well, very few people are building chicken coops intended to last anything as long as a house is, though, so this is not really a problem. Also, there is generally a whole big lot better exposure of the insides of walls to the outside air in a coop or barn than in a house, so rot from internally-produced humidity tends NOT to be a problem in actual practice.​

Hey, if it's not a problem to have moisture all over the place and wood rotting, build it however you want. I'm a bit more persnickety about my own construction, but that's because I really hate the smell of wet chicken.​

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Mrspie, I am not disrespecting your architectural and house engineering knowledge, I am quite sure you know much more about that than most any of us here.

All I'm saying is, barns are not houses

Water-vapor generation rates for a 3-4 person family seem to range from 5-25 gallons depending whose estimates you look at (depends on details of house systems and family habits). Call it 15 gallons a day -- and say they're living in a 2000 square foot house. With 7' ceilings, that is approximately 14000 cubic feet. Fifteen gallons a day into 14000 cu ft equals an input rate of .001 gallons per cu ft of airspace.

A chicken puts out something on the order of, let's say conservatively one cup of water per day - that's 0.063 gallons per day per chicken. Consider 12 chickens living in an 12x10 coop with an 7' ceiling (a low stocking rate compared to what many people have, btw). Consider them stuck indoors pretty much all day during the winter. If you are not removing manure daily (and many, perhaps most people, are not), that is 12 x 0.063 = 0.76 gallons per day, going into 7x10x12 =840 cu ft of airspace. That equals an output rate of .0009 gal/cu ft per day.... virtually identical to my 'house' calculations above.

But notice that is with a LOW stocking rate, and furthermore, the coop is colder. Air at, say, the upper 30's F can hold only about 30% as much moisture as air at 70 F. So for a given water output, the air will be far more humid (from a relative standpoint, which is what matters to chicken health etc) in the example coop than in the example house.

Which is why the first recommendation when you have a condensation problem is ventilation.

Precisely! See, we agree

Look at all the other threads on this subject in this forum, and you will see that IS exaclty what everyone (including me!) advocates. Despite the sarcasm elsewhere in your reply, you will see that pretty much NOBODY, certainly not me, thinks it is ok to have condensation in the coop, and the generally agreed solution IS in fact better airflow. It just didn't come up on this topic because the question was about insulation and vapor barriers, NOT ventilation ;P

Houses are generally designed to handle moisture in the air better than chicken coops or any other farm building. Building codes were designed to keep moisture from being a major problem in houses, so if you look at how houses are constructed, you can get some ideas for reducing moisture in outbuildings.

True, but this is basically a small backyard flock -oriented forum, so I think you will have excessive difficulty in persuading people to install ventilation fans in their coops on a regular basis. (Which by the way, considering agricultural ventilation fans' maintenance headache and low but nonzero fire hazard, not to mention expense, I think is really pretty reasonable).

And if you yourself have the mean$ and desire to build chicken coops that have an expected lifetime of 50+ years, like a house, that's wonderful, but please realize that most of us don't, not on either axis.

Honestly, in many ways, traditional 'barn' type construction seems to hold up as well or better than a lot of modern 'home' type construction, chiefly I think because less-vulnerable materials are used (like, thick honest to goodness lumber siding rather than plywood/chipboard/etc sheathings) and because moisture IS allowed to flow both in AND OUT of materials, rather than getting trapped inside walls (which, much as it may not be supposed to happen with proper design, you have to admit that a whale of a lot of houses have been built that do not *have* such design in this respect).

But again, please understand that I (and pretty much everyone here) utterly AGREE with you about the role of ventilation, ok?

Sittin' down and shuttin' up now,

Pat​

 

[Penske]

WELL...I certainly didn't expect THIS much information!! Thank you! However, it leaves me a bit confused. My husband is not convinced on insulating the coop. He's very concerned that there will be condensation...

If no insulation, the walls will be 3/4" plywood, 40 felt tar paper and cedar shingles (required on Nantucket!). My husband said then he thinks that we should put in a ceiling fan to keep air circulating, pushing the warm air down in the winter and pulling the warm air up in the summer. We will have louver vents as well on the gable ends.

Will that work?????? Has anyone used a ceiling fan?? Would that serve the purpose of keeping them a little warmer (since the space is big for 9-12) AND not have a condensation problem?????

I really appreciate all the time, energy and KNOWLEDGE that was shared on this post. Thanks again!

Lisa
I really don't want to heat the coop or use lights.

 

[mrspie]

Quote:
The thing is, moisture loads in a house are very concentrated. So the size of house is irrelevant: the important thing is the size of the bathroom. That would be 5' x 8' x 8' (average ceiling heights are 8'), or 320 cuft. Big difference.

Precisely! See, we agree

Look at all the other threads on this subject in this forum, and you will see that IS exaclty what everyone (including me!) advocates. Despite the sarcasm elsewhere in your reply, you will see that pretty much NOBODY, certainly not me, thinks it is ok to have condensation in the coop, and the generally agreed solution IS in fact better airflow.

I wasn't being sarcastic. You seemed to be saying barns handled moisture better than houses (well, you disagreed with me that houses handled moisture better than barns, I'm not sure that's the same thing to you), and you told me they dripped condensation from the beams.

I don't know whether that's acceptable to you. I've been in plenty of barns that were not dripping with condensation, so I think it's acceptable or not to different people.

It just didn't come up on this topic because the question was about insulation and vapor barriers, NOT ventilation ;P

Well, in a house, the first way to handle condensation problems is to ventilate, because you usually already have insulation -- or at least you might be unwilling to tear the walls open to add insulation and a vapor barrier. But when you're building a new structure of any kind that will have a moisture load, the best way to handle it is to insulate and put a vapor barrier on the inside, and make sure it's not sealed up too perfectly so that fresh air comes in.

I never suggested a ventilation fan in a chicken coop -- that was talking about a house bathroom situation. Ventilation in a chicken coop is as simple as a slotted hole in the wall, assuming it doesn't get too cold where you are.

And if you yourself have the mean$ and desire to build chicken coops that have an expected lifetime of 50+ years, like a house, that's wonderful, but please realize that most of us don't, not on either axis.

I grew up on a farm in the Northeast. I'm used to building buildings to last a long time because they are pretty expensive to replace constantly.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. My own new coop/shed project is costing less than $500, with insulation and a vapor barrier for the chickens. When you only have a few chickens, you don't need a large space and building a fairly sturdy structure and insulating it is pretty cheap.

Maybe $500 is ridiculously expensive. I'm probably fairly out of touch with what the rest of the world spends on chicken coops. These are pets to me, not livestock. If I lived in Nantucket, I would definitely insulate. The ocean winds there can be pretty harsh in the winter.

I would also take advantage of solar orientation and make a shed roof with the high end on the South side, with a large overhang (several inches) above it and a window right under that, and paint the ceiling of the coop black. In the summer the sun is pretty high in the sky and the overhang will block the sun -- you could open the window to improve ventilation as well -- but in the winter when the sun is low it will come in the window and be absorbed by the dark ceiling to warm the coop up.

Honestly, in many ways, traditional 'barn' type construction seems to hold up as well or better than a lot of modern 'home' type construction

There are a number of reasons for that, including the size and quality of dimensional lumber changing rapidly, and the fact that we now expect to have warm houses (without having to spend $2000 per month on heating). We didn't have central heat when I was a kid -- just fireplaces and a wood stove. The air didn't have any moisture carrying capacity, but then again, we also were really uncomfortable and when you got sick in the winter it was pretty bad.​

 

[Penske]

Good morning,

Please take a minute to read post #14 above --will that plan work? Any experience with that? Any r-value with the 40 felt and cedar shingles??

Thanks again!

Lisa

 

[Oblio13]

I live in central NH, on a huge lake - the winds howl across the ice all winter. I built a nice coop, and our chickens hardly ever go in it if they have a choice. They usually stay outside, rain, wind, cold, whatever.

 

[Buff Hooligans]

If it's any help to see what we did for an insulated 4' x 5' coop, here's a photo of the ventilation (there's a matching one on the other side of the coop):

The screened windows are also covered in winter by sliding plexiglass panes.

Our coop has never had condensation or drafts, and we don't have any source or heat or a fan out there. Hope that helps keep you from worrying too much about your chickens in the weather.

 

[RepoBob]

Wow, you guys are way above my head. I love it. Where else could you get this kind of knowledge for frree. Thanks for all the view points. This is really interesting.

All About the Egg: Thanks for the encourgement, your right.

Pat, Yea I think that was my problem. I fitted it tight to the sides and top, tapped it in tight to the outside wall, but I used 2 inch foam the cavity is 3 1/2 inches. Equals 1 1/2 inch playground.

Very nice Buff.

Thanks again everyone for the info.
Bob

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Insulation will help decrease condensation, yes. However, assuming it involves a vapor barrier, it may somewhat *increase* interior humidity, at the same time. You have to balance what you need w/r/t the one against what you need w/r/t the other.

My husband said then he thinks that we should put in a ceiling fan to keep air circulating, pushing the warm air down in the winter and pulling the warm air up in the summer. We will have louver vents as well on the gable ends. Will that work?????? Has anyone used a ceiling fan?? Would that serve the purpose of keeping them a little warmer (since the space is big for 9-12) AND not have a condensation problem?????

FWIW, we have ceiling fans in the building the chickens are in right now (it was originally built, not by us, as a dog breeding/boarding kennel - cement floor [insulation-plywood-vinyl under the chicken/dog pens], and insulated walls with drywall). I've also worked in horse barns that have ceiling fans. They get VERY dusty, even if the building is pretty well ventilated - basically barns just do have more dust than houses.

So if you want to use ceiling fans I would make certain to get ones designed for industrial or ag use, whose motors are less likely to be adversely affected by dust.

I am not sure a ceiling fan would be precisely what you want. Condensation is not so much a problem per se, IMO, as just plain old humidity. That is, a fan in a closed building may keep more moisture suspended in the air rather than condensing out onto cool surfaces but the biggest problem for chickens *is* moisture in the air, anyhow

The reasons to discourage condensation are basically a) it encourages rot/mold/mildew, and b) water that's condensed on surfaces isn't as easily 'blown out' to the outdoors with whatever indoor-outdoor air exchange you do have. Now before Mrspie says anything, I am NOT NOT NOT saying Oh condensation is not a problem

. It is bad, and you want to minimize/eliminate it. But the best way is by getting to the root cause -- decrease the overall humidity indoors so there isn't as much water vapor in there TO condense.

So if your husband is concerned about ventilation/humidity issues, and really wants the headache of a fan, I would suggest one that actually blows thru the wall OUT of the coop. I do not know as they make ag type fans that small but I would think you could find something of the sort, designed for high-dust environments, of the right size.

If it were me, frankly, I would maybe rough-in an opening for such a fan (after investigating what the specs would need to be) but I would just build the coop with lots of passive ventilation and then wait and see what happens. Personally I'd do more than just louver vents on the gable ends, unless you mean them to be quite large. If you do that, I suspect you will find you not actually need the fan, unless you end up putting a lot more chickens in there than you currently plan. (Not that that could ever happen... <eg>)

Oh, and another thing that REALLY helps control humidity is, construct a droppings board under the roost, and clean it off (remove its poo from coop altogether, that is) every morning. That removes a lot of the chickens' H2O output from the coop, right there.

Hope this helps,

Pat​