I’m a nervous Nelly so having electric heat in the hen house unsupervised would make me nuts. Currently, at 6 degrees, My 5 3yr old GLW’s wont leave their hen house and I dont blame them. This afternoon I bent my rules. I hung a brooder type red lamp from their Roof for 2 hours. They are not enduring the cold as well as previous years. I sit near my window looking out into their henhouse window where i can see the glow of the red light. All 5 ate and drank and looked much more alert during those 2 hours. Thank goodness tomorrow morning will be 12 degrees and Tuesday 20’s. I suppose my chicken keeping practice is supplemental heat to help with a bunch of freezing hens standing frozen in place and not eating or drinking enough. (like i know whats best for them. HA Ha). I need them acclimated for the cold as its a long cold season. 6 degrees is uncommon this early in the season and a couple girls are still molting….sometimes with mother nature, ya gotta take it an hour or 2 at a time. keeping water thawed is another topic that makes my head spin. Tomorrow is a new day tho!
I can’t explain the chemistry behind it but I fill soda bottles with water warm enough to melt the salt and place them in the water bins and water doesn’t freeze may get a thin icy coat but nipples don’t freeze up and the cups will have a little chunk of ice but 5 gal buckets don’t freeze old farmer told me and it’s worked for me
I can’t explain the chemistry behind it but I fill soda bottles with water warm enough to melt the salt and place them in the water bins and water doesn’t freeze may get a thin icy coat but nipples don’t freeze up and the cups will have a little chunk of ice but 5 gal buckets don’t freeze old farmer told me and it’s worked for me
We have a radiative heater (like the one above) in our coop which we turn on throughout the colder months. My husband is always extremely worried about fires starting, so we blow out the coop and heater regularly to prevent dust buildup.
We also make sure to use a clamshell extension cord safety cover where the extension cord and the heater cord connect, so that the plugs don’t get dusty. We keep our heater set to 50°F.
We don’t let the chickens out of the coop until the temperature is above single digits outside. We find that anything below 10° risks frostbite on our Welsummer’s comb. I haven’t had to worry about my hens struggling with the transition from indoor to outdoor temperatures, they handle it just fine.
In their run we have a 48” x 20” seedling heat mat, connected to an extension cord with a clamshell junction cover. We put it in a place where the girls love to stand, and they huddle up on it and keep their feet and bodies warm. This has worked for over a year without issues, and we got the mat for $10 on a cyber monday sale on amazon. Totally worth it!
Our run is covered and is a barn with the floor removed and the walls replaced with hardware cloth. In the winter we have polycarbonate greenhouse panels that we temporarily affix to the exterior to block the wind at ground level. They work great, and it almost made me happy that the wind tore our kit greenhouse down within days of finishing its assembly, because the rails the plastic panels slide into can be screwed onto the studs of our chicken run and the panels can be slipped in and out as the seasons change.
I also have an app on my phone that wakes me up if there is a power outage. In an emergency we would bring our six hens into the house and set up a pen in our living room. We do this during tornado warnings already, so we’re all used to it.
For reference, we live in a place where the lowest temp we’ve experienced is -8°F. We get snow once or twice a year, but never more than a few inches at a time.
