Thank you!
It's 35* out here and very windy...just checked the heating pad brooder setup temps in the hoop coop and could tell I needed to fortify the insulation under the brooder heater and over it, and also close off the back entrance to conserve heat to the area under the brooder pad. Later on the hay bales will be applied to the walls and that will block a lot of wind and hold in temps as well.
I added a layer of hay under the brooder pad to insulate the cold floor of the brooder(plywood over soil) even more than previously and then piled more on top of the brooder pad frame itself to form a nice little hay hobbit house and then placed the thermometer inside it once again and tilted it so that it will touch the underside of the brooder frame/pad. Will see later if that is holding temps better. Since this is all new to me and experimental in nature, this will require some tweaking.
The nice thing is that it will be used on meat chicks first and they are hardy little boogers that have hotter bodies than their layer or DP chick counterparts. They can tolerate the cold so much better, so we'll see how it goes with them...if THEY are too chilled by this setup, then regular chicks will need much more heat even than they.
I'll take video of the hatching if I can.
