Its a heat plate, NOT a radiant heater like a heat lamp - and as long as people don't know the difference, employee and posters both - there will be problems.
Hint: To get much of any effect at all, you need to be in contact with a heat plate. Its temperature across its surface is generally even (ish).
Radiant heat sources like heat lamps will burn you if you touch them, and radiate heat in the infrared spectrum, while their surfaces can be in excess of 550F - hotter than your kitchen oven. The center of the area they focus upon is hottest, falling of as you move away from the center (how fast depends on distance from bulb to surface, but its an exponential, not linear, relationship).
One of the more significant issues with the brooder towers (which are NOT new technologies) is the lack of significant adjustment for those heat plates, to be able to further lower them into the boxes. Training and good management would dictate that employees not put several day old Banties in a box with a fixed (high) height heat plate, but rather reserve that for the ducks, while placing the Banties in one of the boxes that can be adjusted (and adjusting it appropriately)
The other, of course, is people thinking that they are radiant heat sources.
) and saw they had gotten rid of the tower brooder and gone back to stock tanks. All the chicks I had seen previously in the tower system looked fine. No dead chicks, no huddling, no excessive pasty butt, but I know that wasn't the case for every store.
