The side they prefer is the door lol If I keep them out there when it gets cold again, I may go out there and add some wind blocks. Gonna play it by ear at this point.
Think about it this way - if they had a real Mama Hen, do you think that they'd all fit under her at 5 weeks? Nope. She's usually teaching them to roost about this stage. They usually snuggle together because they all just plain can't all get under her anymore. And with as much feathering as they now have, they don't really need the additional heat. The thing we tell folks about using MHP is that the chicks regulate their own comfort. So that's what they are doing. And if you are putting them in unfamiliar surroundings, they'll naturally huddle together for security anyway. Chicks, like chickens, don't do change well.
My first batch of chicks, raised under a heat lamp, went out at 5 weeks. I just couldn't handle the mess, the dust and the noise anymore. That first night I went nuts. I was in and out of bed all night long! I'd put a wireless thermometer in the coop, and a heat lamp, and I put the receiver next to my bed. I kept watching that temperature go down...35......30.....and when it hit 20 I was in a panic. I kept putting on my boots and a heavy coat over my jammies and running out there with a flashlight to check them. Every time I did, they were nowhere near the heat lamp - they were snuggled down in a pile of beaks and feathers in front of the pop door. I went out the next day expecting to find chick-cicles, and instead I saw 23 very happy chicks waiting for me to open the door. They were eating and doing just great. Second night, same story, except I wisely stayed in bed and only got up one time as it hit 19 degrees. They were in exactly the same place they'd been the night before. On the third day I took out the heat lamp. They weren't using it anyway. That night it snowed. This was all during the first week of April. We didn't get our last snowfall until June 6th. Yeah. Delicate? The only critter freezing was me. And these were chicks that I hadn't had the good sense to slowly acclimate...they went from the house out to the coop in one fell swoop. I don't recommend that, of course, but now I start even home incubator hatched chicks directly outdoors in the spring. Spring chick season in Wyoming is still pretty cold compared to much of the country, but they are still weaned completely off the heating pad by around 4 weeks.
They are indeed hardier than we give them credit for. You have to do what you think is right, but at 5 weeks old trying to stuff them under a heating pad they are clearly telling you they don't want to be under anymore is kinda like an exercise in futility.
Multiple heating pads in one brooder don't seem to work out well. The chicks all try to crowd under the same pad, ignoring the other empty ones. Probably divide them into groups of about 20, each group in their own brooder, with their own pad.
