hagoesch
Songster
Hello from snowy southeastern Wisconsin!
Our coop is functionally a chicken wire-walled "room" built into the corner of a pole barn. The barn itself has the vertical support beams sunk into cement pier bases but instead of a concrete slab floor we chose to go directly onto compacted crushed limestone. Despite my best efforts to keep moisture and drafts out by covering the edges of one of the two roll-up doors and the big Dutch door in the middle with moving blankets, cardboard, plywood, whatever I can find (don't worry, there is plenty of ventilation still at the top of both of these and the second roll-up door), the generally higher humidity and added snowfall here in WI causes the external moisture to creep along the floor several feet inside. I think it's because wet wants to find dry and travels under the walls through the limestone. The hygrometer in the coop reads a relative humidity level generally on par with the outside, and the temp in there is also about the same, maybe one or two degrees warmer. (Coop floor is covered with 3-4" fine sand then several inches, probably up to around 8 or so now, of pine shavings for deep littering.)
I understand this will be the case in an uninsulated, unheated barn without a dehumidifier, but is there anything I can do to possibly mitigate the spread of that cold dampness?
Oh, a few photos attached of the moisture line below! (Disregard the rag-tag clutter I used for the barriers... the barn was completed late this autumn and we didn't get a chance to finish a lot of stuff yet.)
Thanks in advance!
Heather
Our coop is functionally a chicken wire-walled "room" built into the corner of a pole barn. The barn itself has the vertical support beams sunk into cement pier bases but instead of a concrete slab floor we chose to go directly onto compacted crushed limestone. Despite my best efforts to keep moisture and drafts out by covering the edges of one of the two roll-up doors and the big Dutch door in the middle with moving blankets, cardboard, plywood, whatever I can find (don't worry, there is plenty of ventilation still at the top of both of these and the second roll-up door), the generally higher humidity and added snowfall here in WI causes the external moisture to creep along the floor several feet inside. I think it's because wet wants to find dry and travels under the walls through the limestone. The hygrometer in the coop reads a relative humidity level generally on par with the outside, and the temp in there is also about the same, maybe one or two degrees warmer. (Coop floor is covered with 3-4" fine sand then several inches, probably up to around 8 or so now, of pine shavings for deep littering.)
I understand this will be the case in an uninsulated, unheated barn without a dehumidifier, but is there anything I can do to possibly mitigate the spread of that cold dampness?
Oh, a few photos attached of the moisture line below! (Disregard the rag-tag clutter I used for the barriers... the barn was completed late this autumn and we didn't get a chance to finish a lot of stuff yet.)
Thanks in advance!
Heather
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