Poop board with or without lip?

[TalkALittle]

I use a light sprinkling of sand and recently started adding a sprinkle of PDZ on my poop board. The poop just sits on top of the sand and I rake it off onto a hardware cloth screen and then dump it a bucket then it goes into the compost pile. It is only lightly coated with sand and PDZ. I have clay soil so, once it's composted, the little bit of sand does a good job of helping to break up the clay soil.

 

[RichnSteph]

To all those who use a sand/pdz/stable dri mix... I cannot find anywhere where this material is compostable. I do know that sand is not - so my thinking is the others are not either. I get they are not harmful, w/ the exception of possible e-coli not being removed. Thoughts on this?

I love the idea of a clean smelling coop... but we want to use our chicken poo

My poop board is bordered with 1x4's and is about 3" deep of stable-dri. I use a cat litter scoop to lift the poo out and shake off any stable-dri. The poop goes into a bucket and into the compost bin. We haven't used the compost much yet but are planning to do so with some planting boxes for onions and a few other root type veggies. We hot compost so I'm hoping the heat in there, once it gets back up to temperature, will kill anything bad.

 

[aart]

Lip!!
I like the granulated PDZ mixed with some sand because:

Reduces ammonia odor.

Poops don't stick to the board, especially in winter......
........but mine is lined with heavy duty foam backed vinyl sheet flooring.

I think the sifting is easier than scraping, some sand clings to poops keeps it from sticking to anything.

Sand mix only needs to be about 1/2" deep....any deeper and they want to dust bathe in it.

 

[SusanPC]

I also use a poop board under their roost filled with Sweet PDZ. I have 4 hens and scoop with a kitty litter scoop into a bucket 2x a week. The poop goes into a composting bin. I don't like the idea of scooping every day and I think the Sweet PDZ may help cut down the smell. If I had more birds i might feel the need to scoop every other day. I just replaced my PDZ after using for 4 months. The photo below is before I replaced the sand with PDZ and removed the ladder. The setup works well for me except harder to reach the far end.

 

[sweets3068]

Oh what a great idea. Thank you so much for sharing. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out a better surface and my slick plywood.

 

[PapaChaz]

Oh what a great idea. Thank you so much for sharing. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out a better surface and my slick plywood.

if you can find a flooring store with some scrap vinyl it works great on the poop board. I had some left over and after I attached the 1x4s around the edge for the lip, I put the vinyl down. I cut it long enough and wide enough to cover the bottom and up the sides. Cut the corners at an angle and stapled it all around. Then put about 1/2" of sand, and sprinkled sweet pdz on top of that. One of the bags of sand I used was wet, I let it dry a couple days before adding the pdz, but it still soaked all the moisture out of it.

here's mine:


for those in this thread who have said they don't want to spend time sifting sand to get the poo out, basically this is just taking a scoop where the poop is and picking it out. You don't have to sift the whole poop board full of sand/pdz everyday. I'd guarantee there is no more effort put into scooping out the poo than there is for you to scrape that poo off, and with the sand pdz there is NO odor. I can't wrap my head around why anyone would want to make this more unpleasant by having to deal with the odor.......