Topic of the Week - Heat Sources: Yes or No?

[Doodlemom63]

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!

Soda bottles filled with salt heavy salt water helps with the freezing here in nc

 

[Robert Kazlauski]

Soda bottles filled with salt heavy salt water helps with the freezing here in nc

Please explain how that helps. Do you put in boiling or very very hot water in the bottle?

 

[Doodlemom63]

Please explain how that helps. Do you put in boiling or very very hot water in the bottle?

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

 

[FrostRanger]

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

Salt water has a lower freezing point than fresh

 

[Nanook33]

Safest heater is to hang a radiator heater. We have used one for years.

 

[Winderdear]

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.

 

[katanajo]

No heat here or heated water, just to far from power source. -2 F this morning already took some water down for the girls.

Us too which is why I went with an ecoflow solar power station. We keep it in the barn and run a frost king extension cord from the barn to the coop to power a heater and heated waterer. It's portable and dual purposes. When not winter we can haul it around the property when we need power to use power tools or a water pump. We don't get much bright sun in the winter so we got a model that you can charge via A/C which takes 50 min to get to 100%.

 

[katanajo]

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.

View attachment 4238059

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.

Where do you place the seedling heat mat? Does it sit on top of their bedding material or a piece of wood?