I don’t know if I could eat my girls. But I get your system and sounds great. This is their first winter and I don’t add artificial light. I do believe I have two that aren’t molting that’s why the eggs. They still look good compared to the others. They look like they have been run over by a Mac truck. LolYours is a real common problem. I'll put my two cents worth in.
Before they were domesticated chickens evolved to follow a certain life cycle. They would hatch and raise chicks in the spring and summer when food was plentiful but stop laying and molt to replace warn out feathers in the fall/winter when food was scarcer. What food they could get went to feathers and keeping warm, not laying eggs. The trigger to stop laying and start the molt is technically the nights getting longer, but we usually talk about the days getting shorter.
Now we have domesticated them. We've bred them to lay a lot more eggs and to not go broody that often. We provide a lot of food for them year around, not just in the spring, summer, and early fall. We often mess with the light. Their basic instincts is to still follow that life cycle but we've really messed it up. It's even possible some will still lay an egg when they are molting, we've messed them up that much, but it is still pretty rare. Another example that with living animals anything can happen.
If you provide light so the days don't get shorter they do not receive the signal to molt and stop laying. You can keep them laying. But after they have laid continually for a length of time, with commercial flocks around 13 to 15 months, egg production suffers. That is the catch. They lay fewer eggs and egg quality drops. They need to molt and recharge their system. At some point profitability drops to a point that the commercial operations have to decide whether to feed them through a molt to get them back to a great egg producing cycle or to replace them. Typically after a second adult molt egg laying drops enough that they are better off replacing them. You are probably not working on that fine a margin.
Often, not always but often, production breed pullets will skip the molt their first winter and keep laying all the way until the next fall when days get shorter.
The way I manage this is that I do not add any lights to keep them laying. Most of my pullets still lay through the first winter. Most of my adult hens will start to lay after they finish with the molt, they do not necessarily wait for the days to get longer, though some do.
Every year I keep half the number of pullets that I want as hens in my laying/breeding flock. I hatch my own replacements with an incubator or broody hens. I eat the excess cockerels and excess pullets. I keep the hens that were pullets the previous year and feed them through the molt. But I eat the ones I fed through the molt the previous winter when they stop laying and start to molt.
I want my laying/breeding flock to be 8 hens. Use your own numbers. So each year I keep four replacement pullets and eat four older hens when they start to molt. I feed eight hens and pullets through the winter and get some eggs. The next summer I have eight hens laying well. In the fall when that year's pullet's start laying I get a lot of eggs.
This is the way I manage it. I'm capable of eating my excess hens so the numbers of chickens don't get out of hand. Doesn't sound like that part will work for you.
Good luck!
