I’ve had pullets lay their first eggs in early December without any additional lights. I’ve had pullets wait until the days start getting longer in spring before they start to lay. The age they start to lay has been all over the board too. They are not real consistent. If they do start to lay they normally lay pretty well depending on how well they will lay in the good weather. Extremes in temperature can affect that laying too, either too hot in summer or too cold in winter. Before they were domesticated they lay eggs and hatched chicks in the good season and took the winter off since food was harder to come by. But since they have been domesticated they can do about anything.
It’s not the length of daylight that counts, it’s that the days are getting longer. Days getting shorter can stop them laying and start a molt but I’ve had plenty of pullets start to lay in late summer and continue laying throughout the winter without lights. Did I say they were inconsistent?
If you decide to add lights, based on their age I suggest you start extending the light a half hour as Aart said in early November. An hour or hour and a half at most extra light gradually introduced should trigger them to start laying. It’s not an instantaneous process. They have to make changes internally to their egg making factory before they can start to lay. If they are kind of leaning this way it could happen fairly quickly but if they are slow to mature anyway it could still be a month or more. One thing to remember is the length of daylight they are getting. You do not want to stop that amount of light until your natural light matches in the spring. If you stop the extra light too soon you could send them into a molt by shortening the length of daylight in the spring. Wouldn’t that be a bummer? I like Egghead’s 12 hours so you can stop the extra light early but that may depend on where you live and how long or short your days are.
Different coops are different sizes, brightness, and configurations. Different lights work in different coops. If you can read a newspaper in the coop with the amount of light you are adding you should be good to go.
Each individual hen is different. The averages may or may not apply to them. Commercial flocks numbering in the thousands so averages mean something go through a specific laying curve. They ramp up to maximum production fairly soon, maintain it for a while, then gradually decline in number of eggs laid. The quality can decline a bit too. After somewhere around 13 months production normally hits around 60% of the peak production seen months earlier. That’s when they either replace them or put them through a molt to get back to profitable production.
You don’t have commercial chickens and you don’t have enough for averages to mean much. But that cycle is still fairly consistent. At some point yours will get burned out and need to go through a molt to recover and give you good production. You can manipulate that with lights or let them go through a normal cycle next year. Going too long between molts does stress them and can lead to bad quality eggs or serious loss of production. It’s something we have to live with.
For yours I see absolutely nothing wrong with getting them on artificial lights and laying this winter. You can either let them go natural next year and deal with a period of few or probably no eggs when they molt, starting lights again after they are molting if you wish, or keep lights on them in winter. But at some point production will drop if you do that.
The way I normally handle this is to raise new pullets every year so I have some that lay through the winter without lights. That doesn’t always work but it does most years.
There is no right or wrong way to do any of this. We all do it differently. And not all chickens are the same. Some just don’t follow the norms. Hopefully having a little information will help you plan.
Good luck!
