One of the big problems with heating a coop is that heat is expensive, and we have been taught all along to keep the area air tight to trap the heat and not be heating "the great American outdoors" to quote my dad.
Problem, when you trap heat, you also trap moisture, and generally add a build up of gases from manure. Those are elements that can seriously effect your birds in a negative way.
Again, dry conditions = healthy birds. To get dry birds, you need at least a foot of space above their heads, and they need to be about foot away from the wall, where moisture will condense. You need good bedding on the floor to absorb moisture, and good ventilation to remove moisture from the building.
The quoted poster has a very large coop, most backyard coops are no where near that size. However, that size should also help keep them dry.
Mrs K
Yup, it's not black and white. Saying heating is "downright harmful" is not useful.....EVERYone has to look at their overall setup and their birds/animals needs and consider WHY things are being considered harmful or not. MeepBeep is right - in her situation, providing low, dry heat means her birds are healthier, and she doesn't have to heat water, etc. You are right - she has a large setup that isn't the typical back yard coop, so a large forced air furnace in her situation makes sense, where it won't in many other backyard coops.
Heating, though, isn't intrinsically something evil, and all your suggested things to reduce moisture may also cause other problems if they aren't done properly (too much bedding, and you'll never get a dry environment, if you don't also control the amount of condensation, or if your water system is wetting the bedding, etc...) Yes, sometimes things cause fires...but that includes regular electrical wiring as well as heat lamps, and there are ways to reduce the risk of heat lamps if that is the system one chooses. For every coop that burns, there are thousands and thousands that do not. Cold can lead to frostbite and increases feed costs, but it has to be understood what constitutes "cold" for chickens, biologically (vs humans used to central heating and hot climate), in order not to increase risk or cost unnecessarily.
I dunno. I'm sure this will attract disdain and dislike, but I think that understanding the variables of one's own set up is worth more than creating fear or smearing the way someone else has things working, and understanding what creates the risk of certain options allows for mitigation of the risk vs just ruling out entire options because someone else set it up without taking adequate precautions, or because someone else has a generalised fear of something. Chickens have certain needs and a range of temperature and humidity at which they, biologically, function properly and remain healthy. It seems to me that that's good information to have, along with any breed specific considerations, when considering how to set up for cold.
Could be that's what you're saying and I'm misinterpreting, but I'm kind of also responding to MeepBeep saying she's apparently been told that heating is "downright harmful". I worried so much about how to set up heat for my hens, but in the end, it was wasted fretting, because with a level of awareness of risk issues, my set up worked as well as any of the probably dozens of others I could have used, and they turned out to be fairly hardy after all. (I was told they were rather delicate....)
