Chicken coops plans

Posts Tagged ‘chicken house’

Two of the most important aspects of building your own chicken coop is having adequate ventilation and insulation as it directly affects the health of the chickens. In order to maintain proper air quality in the chicken house, significant venting must be incorporated into your chicken coop design. At the end of the day, your proper coop ventilation and insulation will keep the chickens comfortable regardless of the season.

Proper Ventilation of a Chicken Coop

Chickens can withstand cold temperatures. However, they are quite vulnerable to drafts. Thus, it is important to provide ventilation in a way that minimizes drafts. The secret here is to control the general air flow patterns within the chicken house. During winter time, the only open vents are those that are generally located in or near the roof. This is above where the chickens reside. It is vital during winter to close off doors and windows in an airtight manner. This is the only sure way to reduce drafts. Ideally, the doors should be weather-stripped and glass. Plexiglass windows can be fixed to allow light in while eliminating air from entering during the cold weather.

During warm months, on the other hand, ventilation is important as well to maintain air quality. In addition, ventilation will help regulate temperatures within the house. With warm weather, the doors and windows may be left open, but should be screened. This is to keep the chicken safe from predators. During extremely hot summer, it may be advisable to replace one or two solid walls with screened walls instead. Introduce vents where the walls of the coop meet the roof and keep these venting area open as much as possible without allowing the rain to enter.

Furthermore, you can also plant tall shrubs and trees outside the chicken house to create a cooling effect. Make sure to check that the plants do not block the ventilation holes and windows too.

Proper Insulation of a Chicken Coop

The coop’s ventilation must work together with the equally important insulation. With proper insulation, your chickens will be kept cool during the summer and kept dry and warm during winter. As a suggested insulation, use 1.5 inches thick Styrofoam sheets between the coop’s walls and ceiling. This will serve as structural insulation and protection. You can also use white paint and aluminum roofing to reflect heat during summer months. To add insulation during winter, you can stack hay bales against the coop’s northern walls as well.

For a step-by-step guide to Building Chicken Coop, check out our site for more free tips, building advices, product reviews, and more blog updates. Need more details? Start with our Blog’s review on your blueprint on How to Build Chicken Coop Now.

Decide on what type of hen house to have and draw up plans for it. The hen house should be centrally located either in the middle of the pen or along one of the fences. There can be pop doors on each side to allow the chickens access to different yards if there are more than one. There are many good plans for chicken houses in books and on the web. They range from simple open-fronted, lean-to, sheds to fully framed houses with doors and windows. Climate, flock size, room available, costs, and building abilities, all need to be considered, before deciding on a poultry house. Draw out a plan for the house, remembering to include nest boxes, roosts, and accesses such as doors and windows. Plan for how the house will be cleaned out each year and have doorways wide enough for wheelbarrows to fit through. Make a list of materials that will be needed. Don’t use any fiber or paste board, because they will disintegrate due to moisture. Vinyl siding is a good building material because it can be washed down and won’t rot. Metal is a good roof choice, but metal walls will rust quickly around manure. In deciding where to locate the house consider prevailing winds, available room, shade, and sun. Decide on the type of floor the chicken house will have, plain dirt, off grade wooden, or poured concrete. The walls of a framed house will need at least cinder blocks for a foundation. In colder climates, hollow walls that are insulated may be needed, but be aware they are a haven for rodents. Chicken Houses that are off grade will have to have wire around the bottom so the chickens can’t get under them to hide eggs and undermine the foundation. Like hollow walls, floors that are off grade can become a nesting area for rodents.

Types of ventilation

Passive (natural) ventilation means that you have openings that air flows through with no help from you or the power grid — just the natural action of wind and the tendency of warm air to rise. Passive ventilation includes an open window, a ventilation slot, a louvered gable-end vent, that sort of thing.

Passive ventilation is the easiest, cheapest, safest, and most foolproof method for the vast majority of backyard coops, in my opinion. Build lots of it.

Wind turbine ventilation means those spinning turbine things, about the size of a basketball, that you mount on a building’s roof. When the wind blows, it spins the blades and they suck air actively out of the coop. This can move a goodly amount of air, but only if the wind is blowing. When the wind stops, it becomes a smallish hole in the roof, period.

Active (mechanical) ventilation means using an electric fan, generally plug-in although small solar powered units do exist. This allows you to get greater air movement with smaller holes in your coop walls, but with several important drawbacks. You really ought to get a fan designed for dusty and outdoorsy environments (designed for barn or workshop use), which costs more – a house fan will very quickly clog with dust and stop working or die altogether. Even appropriate fans need to be cleaned regularly or their performance becomes poor and they can become a fire hazard. Also, if your power supply fails, so does your coop air quality (solar units usually run only when the sun is actually shining on them, so are no use at night).

So how much ventilation do I need?

More than you probably think. More, proportionately speaking, than you’re used to seeing on a house, or doghouse, or garden shed, or things like that. It is really impressive how much water vapor (as well as ammonia and heat) even just a chicken or two will emit, round the clock, day in day out.

So the best answer is probably “as much as (or slightly more than) you can reasonably build”. Honestly, that is the simplest, easiest, most foolproof way to go. It is ever so much better to have more than you need than to need more than you have! Especially if “needing more than you have” comes down to a trip out back with the reciprocating saw to hack big ugly holes in your nice pretty trimmed-and-finished coop in the depths of January. Plan ahead.

All vents should have doors/flaps/covers/what-have-you so that parts can be closed down when not desired. Unless you’re in a climate that stays fairly warmish year-round, covers should be draft-proof. Either they should fit very snugly, or be weatherstripped in places the chickens can’t peck, or (sometimes simplest) the ones you’re not going to ever use in cool weather can just be “decommissioned” at the end of the summer, panels bolted over them, and any gaps sealed til Spring in some manner the chickens won’t peck at. In areas where cool weather is not all that cool and only lasts a few months, you can reverse the concept — just build one or more walls entirely of wire (on studs) and simply cover ‘em with plywood or plastic for your so-called winter.

If you live in a hot climate, you need large areas of ventilation that can be opened up on all 4 walls, and really it is best if one or more walls can be pretty much removed entirely so they’re just screen (like hardwarecloth). In a climate where it never gets really all that hot, you can probably skip the whole-wall-coming-off part… unless you are in a desert-y area with giant temperature swings from day to night, in which case you may still want something of that sort. But even up North it is far-and-away best to have the ability to fling open the hatches and get lots and lots of fresh air. If nothing else, this will be of great assistance to you in drying the coop out if you should ever find yourself needing to hose down or disinfect the inside!

Securely screen your vents, whatever the size, with something like hardwarecloth that predators can’t rip off, climb between, or grab handsfulls of chickens through.

“What if I just use a hole-saw to put a buncha 2″ holes in the walls and screen them, that’ll be good, right?” Unfortunately, a 2″ diameter hole is about 3 square inches of total area. To put this in perspective, a square foot is 144 square inches. You would need almost 50 holes to equal one square foot of ventilation, and a typical coop is going to need MUCH more than just one square foot of ventilation! So, little round holes: probably not such a good plan. You want actual decent-sized openings, like 6″ x 4′ or 1′x3′ or like that, on most if not all walls.

Ventilation yes: drafts NO

While ventilation aka air exchange is necessary and good, having cold air aimed right at your chickens is BAD. (I’m talking about in cool weather, here, not your ‘pleasant cooling breeze on stifling August day’ which would of course be good.) So you need to design your ventilation intelligently.

Ventilation that you’ll be using in cool/cold weather (i.e. all year-round) should be high up above chicken level, at the tops of the walls, ideally protected from rain and wind to some degree by roof overhangs. You can put vent slots, long and relatively narrow, atop all four walls. (By narrow I mean like 4″-8″ wide or something like that, not an inch or two width of ‘arrow slot’, unless it is a small coop for just a couple few chickens.) Not right over or next to the roost, however.

You’ll want additional ventilation for warmer weather, that can (should!) be lower down where the chickens can catch some breeze. Windows work; giant removable wall panels work; that sort of thing.

Do the coop ‘people door’ and pophole count? Sort of. I mean, yes, they do provide ventilation when they are open, but remember that they will not always be open and you need to be able to provide sufficient airflow even when they aren’t. I would not suggest counting on them towards your basic ventilation needs.

Manage your ventilation intelligently — you will want to change the amount that’s open according to the weather, although as mentioned you don’t want to shut it all down except in very rare instances. Sometimes you’ll want to close upwind vents if it’s getting too windy in the coop on a windy day.

In a really windy site, you may want to build some sort of baffle or hood for some of the usually-upwind vents (the high year-round ones) to blunt the force of the wind.

What about winter? Don’t I need to close the vents to keep the chickens warm?

NO. Well ok, yeah, you will close some of them down, relative to summer conditions; but you still need a goodly amount of air exchange going on, so you cannot shut your ventilation off.

In some ways ventilation is actually more important in winter because cold air can’t hold nearly so much water vapor before it gets saturated i.e. really damp and humid and clammy, i.e. you’re trolling for frostbite and respiratory disease.

So yes, your vents will be letting in cold air, but you know what, that’s OK as long as it is not breezing down directly at your chickens. If you’re concerned about the chickens getting too cold — although most standard-sized breeds are fine down to freezing and significantly below, as long as the air is dry and relatively still and they have an appropriate-width roost and plenty of food — then insulate your coop. And yes, insulation is quite useful even with vents open (for some reason this issue comes up often); would you think it pointless to wear a winter coat just ‘cuz you had no hat on? What insulation does is reduce heat loss from the coop so that you can afford to admit more cold air without making the place too cold.

In a super-cold climate, and let me say that I do not consider southern Ontario Canada where I live to fall into this category (!), you may want to think about arranging for your vents to be taking air in from a somewhat thermally-buffered source… a predatorproofed flue run along the ground a ways and covered in insulation, or a translucently-enclosed space that the sun warms, or the building’s attic, or a larger barn, or like that.

Article Source : http://www.freewebs.com/professorchicken/

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Poultry farmers could soon be the source of much more than buffalo wings and omelets. Chickens byproducts could be used to make biodegradable plastics and cheap energy, two new studies find.

Many types of animal waste and plants, including corn and soybeans, have been proposed as alternative sources of plastics and fuel, and demand for them is on the rise.

So one researcher has turned to agricultural waste, such as poultry feathers and eggs that didn’t pass inspection, which are currently used in low-value animal feed or simply thrown away, to develop more environmentally friendly plastics.

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“Twelve percent of all plastic packaging ends up in landfills because only a fraction is recycled,” said Virginia Tech researcher Justin Barone, who is heading up the agricultural waste effort. “Once in a landfill, it doesn’t biodegrade. The challenge is, how can we create a simpler plastic bag or a bottle that will biodegrade?”

Today, packaging adds 29 million tons of non-biodegradable plastic waste to landfills every year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,

Plastics from biomass (animal waste and plant materials), like some recently developed to dissolve in seawater, are made the same way as petroleum-based plastics, are actually cheaper to manufacture and meet or exceed most performance standards. But they lack the same water resistance or longevity as conventional plastics, said Barone, who presented his research at the March 29 American Chemical Society National Meeting in Chicago.

Adding polymers created with keratin, a protein that makes hair, nails and feathers strong, may improve the strength and longevity of the plastics made from chicken feathers and eggs. Other modifications to the polymer, such as adding chicken fat as a lubricant, should help the polymer to be processed faster and smell better.

Another scientist has developed a furnace system that converts poultry litter into a fuel that can be used to heat chicken houses.

The fuel, made from poultry waste and rice hulls and wood shavings once used as chicken bedding, can be gathered from hen houses, stored on-site, and put into a heat-generating furnace, reducing farmers’ energy costs by as much as 80 percent.

While the fuel would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it does produce an ash that could hurt sensitive watersheds if dumped there, said Tom Costello of the University of Arkansas, who led work to develop the furnace.

• Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies
• New Biodegradable Plastics Could Be Tossed into the Sea
• All About the Environment

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So, you have been keeping chickens for quite some time and looking at their accommodation, it is looking a little tired, shabby and worn and let us be honest it is definitely past its best. Your chickens really could do with a new poultry house but the reality is, it is the cost of buying a new one that is making you hesitate. Have you considered building yourself a new poultry house?

To buy a new readymade one is pretty expensive and it is more than likely to be delivered flat packed, so you are going to have to get your hammer and screwdriver set out to construct it anyway. It is also more than possible that, even paying a lot of money you will not necessarily get the kind of housing that suits you and your feathered friends needs.

Imagine the flexibility you will have in building your own and the challenge of planning a new design to incorporate the kind of security that your old chicken house is beginning to lack due to its age. You know you need your chickens need to be safe at all times but especially at night.

What better way of ensuring that your poultry are going to be warm, safe and very secure because of the time and effort you put into this new project. You already know that happy chickens are good egg layers.

The fact that you can make a trip to the DIY store and get the materials that you will need at a fraction of the cost of a readymade poultry house is even more satisfying.

So, now you have no excuse for leaving your chickens in accommodation that is a little lacking in style and you can build a new poultry house very cheaply and quickly. Your neighbours will be astounded at your DIY skills, your chickens will be safe and comfortable and you will have the satisfaction of having built a new poultry house to be rightfully proud of.

Building a new poultry house can be easy when you are given the correct information. They are practical, easy to assemble and can save you a fortune. There are dozens of websites that claim to offer poultry house plans, but very few offer you more than a single design. The best poultry house designs website online has been endorsed by thousands of chicken breeders and owners so far and is well worth you reviewing.

So, with much of the structure of the chicken house built, I’m starting to work on making them some accessories, like a nest box (which they will need Real Soon Now) and a more automated feeder. (I also have an automated waterer, but it leaks like mad and I need to buy some replacement pieces for it.) Because chicken people love to share designs for their chicken devices, I figured I’d show some sketchbook scans of what I’ve worked out so far.

The idea for the feeder is that it sticks through the wall of the chicken room, so we refill it from the shed side. This will allow us to refill it without getting all poopy, and also it keeps the feeder from taking up floor space in the chicken room. And since chickens are really really messy eaters, this is designed so they can just get their heads in.

I’ll be making a couple of these: one for feed, and one divided up into bins for oyster shells and grit. The feed bin is going to be large enough to take a 50-lb sack of feed, while the grit and shell bins will be a bit smaller, I suppose, because they just don’t consume as much of those as they do feed.

I spent some time working out the measurements so that the volume worked out right and also the bin was arranged to slide the food down but not out. And of course so that there was enough room to pour a sack of food into the bin, which is going to be my main way of interacting with the feeder.

The nest box is a bit more critical (chickens are creatures of habit, so I want them to be in the habit of laying eggs in the nest box rather than around the yard).

From my reading on nest boxes, I knew I wanted one that opened from the back, and ideally I wanted a roll-out nest box so that the eggs will tend not to sit there and get stomped on and pooped on and so forth. The back opening is so we can gather eggs without going in the chicken room, see earlier note about poop.

After doing a bit of reading and so forth to see how people used roll-out nest boxes, I found that apparently sometimes eggs with fragile shells make a real mess of roll-out bins, so I decided to compromise and build one with a tilt to it that is padded with bedding. I can convert it to more fully roll-out later if that seems to be working.

The dimensions are kind of loose on nest boxes, from what I can see. People use everything from milk crates and five-gallon pails to special commercial units. Chickens seem to like nesting together, so I gave them some extra room. Also, they will be all full of egg and needing some help to get in there, so I will be using some small shelf brackets to make them a step.

I’m not sure of the measurements for the tilt and so on, but this is where I’m going to start with my cutting up of stuff.

For both these things, I’m going to be using the plywood wall of the chicken room as the front of the box. That’ll make a more seamless face in the chicken room, which is good considering the antics those chickens get up to.

Last night we borrowed a truck and got some more siding (lordy, I am tired of hefting that siding around) and drywall, so we have a fun-packed weekend ahead of us, I am sure.

Technorati Tags: chickens, design, drawings, urban farming

posted by ayse on 07/23/08

Clever designs! I’m forwarding this page to my goat-milk supplier, who now has chickens, too.

I had not thought of tilting the nest box. Great idea. How did the construction turn out? (Maybe I should read more of your site before asking that question.)

I’m finishing the design on our coop and am about to move to construction.

The construction came out pretty well, actually. In the end, I put so much bedding in the nest box that eggs don’t really roll out at all, but my girls are actually very good about not beating the heck out of their eggs, so it works out well.

If you do tilt the box, make sure to put some kind of padding at the back so the eggs don’t roll down and crack when they hit the wall.

Note: I’m tweaking the spam filter. Just FYI.

Small Chicken Coop Plans

A growing number of people are choosing to build mobile and small chicken coops over large coops that cannot be moved. This is because the advantages of a portable coop are far greater than those of larger, permanent ones. The choice at the end of the day is yours; however, there are some critical things that you should consider before deciding which chicken coop type is best for you. The following are a few things I feel make mobile and small chicken coops a great option:

Easier to Clean
This is one of the best benefits of mobile coops. They are smaller and therefore cleaning is a much easier task. Plus you can just put the coop close to your home and make cleaning less of a hassle. Another great thing is that you can just take the coop to a cement garage and wash it down with a hose.

Less Expensive To Build
This is also a huge advantage for mobile and small chicken houses. When compared to large coops, they need less material, time and effort, and that makes them a better option in this regard. Oftentimes, you can use spare lumber that you have lying around your property. You can also go around and ask a neighbor for any excess materials they may not need. You can also try visiting constructions site and asking for spare materials. Because the coop is small you don’t really need as much materials and can use scraps from around your town to build it, saving you a lot of money.

Decreased feeding time
Another benefit of portable chicken houses is that they take less time to feed the chickens as it would for a large coop. By just keeping the smaller coop nearer to your house, you won’t have to walk a lot to feed the chickens. Many folks appreciate this benefit of mobile coops, so it is certainly something you should take into consideration.

Limited Space
This is a downside of portable chicken coops, as the number of chickens you can keep is quite limited. If you want to keep more than six chickens, then small coops are generally not a suitable option for you. Portable coops are usually a better option for those who want to keep chickens as a small hobby, rather than a major one.

Less Durability
Portable chicken houses have to be well made if you want them to survive the daily wear and tear of constant use. If this is not maintained then it is very likely that you will face problems, and repairs will be needed more often than a normal sized coop.

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Several years ago I was living and working at Dalpura Farm in Moriac,Victoria a 100 or so acre silvapastoral project.The client George Howson was interested in implementing an aquaponics system so we all went for a day and a half trip to Melbourne to attend a seminar on the subject.

Leading up to this I had started gathering chickens and roosters from the local area from people giving them away for one reason or another to start using as workers on the farm.At that time I had sourced 21 birds,a third being roosters.The plan was to eventually separate them into tractoring groups to reduce the competition and fighting of the roosters.Long term they would go into a set of 4 cell grazing areas and rotate with crop systems.Even longer term the roosters would be our meat source and hens kept for egg production.

I have always been an avid poultry enthusiast and had raised a good flock in past years in Humpty Doo,NT.I always loved to just sit and watch new chicks making their way and learning from their parents.The breed I had were ‘Old English Game Fowl’ and the hen (Ruby) and rooster (Rudy) were a fantastic pair for parenting and protection of their young.

We had always been present on the farm during the day and the chooks would free range after being let out of their house in the mornings.Everything was great and eggs were coming daily and the animals seemed happy.Unbeknown there was a menace lerking.

On the day we left for the seminar our next door neighbour Carley was asked to close the door on the chooks in the evenings around 6pm on her way past the property.We set off and didn’t give the farm another thought.Everything was in good hands.

On returning to the farm from Melbourne I found the entire housing envelop covered in chicken feathers.Carley was on hand and explained that when she came to close the chicken house door the previous evening there was one rooster running around scared and the rest had been attacked by a fox(s).She was clearly upset as she felt responsible for the event but she was not to blame.I was devastated as the flock I was rearing was now gone.A huge feedback loop.The fox had obviously been casing the joint and the first opportunity of no action on the farm and he took his chance.

So with this I had to redesign the system to still do the same function as before but to include fox proofing into it.For one,the old cattle race being used would need to be made secure as this is where the 4 cell grazing pens were.More importantly the chicken house needed to be located a bit more user friendly to this to reduce the amount of time it took us as workers to put the chickens to work.I considered a chicken tractor within the cell grazing pens but this would have meant a lot of moving so I went back to the drawing board.

Ralph our next door neighbour is a collector of all things from the rubbish dump and I found an old trailer with a very rusted floor in amongst his collection and asked if I could have it.Ralph being a great bloke brought it over to our workshop.I hadn’t a clue what I was going to do with it yet.

One day on the drive home fro the store I noticed an old water tank rusting away on another property and went and asked the owner if I could salvage it.She was ever so pleased to have it taken away as it was no longer serving its purpose keeping fire wood dry.It had been turned on its side with the roof cut out and fire wood stacked inside.The entire bottom side was rusting out but I could use it for something.When I got it back to the farm I unloaded it from the trailer and for the moment just set it atop the old trailer Ralph has dropped off in front of the workshop till I figured out where I would put it long term.

Its funny how some things just click.The next day I walked past the workshop and a creative light came on in my head as I noticed the tank and the trailer sitting their.The rusted part of the tank was about the same size as the dimensions as the floor space of the trailer.What if I set the tank on the trailer and put a door on it,would this keep the chickens safe and be mobile?I went about putting my idea into action.No design or sketches,just a vision in my mind.

I cut the rusty floor out of the trailer and it revealed that the rest of the body was in not too bad shape.Not good enough for highway use but good enough for the farm.I then cut the rust out of the tank and with some 2m garden stakes to prop the tank from collapse.

There was about 60mm surplus length on the tank and when it sat atop the trailer that 60mm was panel beated to sit inside the trailer body.

The site gets a lot of weather from the west so the back of the trailer would be placed against the weather.Some ventilation will be needed in the tank so a couple of flaps were cut into the metal and bent out.It is amazing what you can do with a 6 inch angle grinder.

Some old roofing iron was sourced from an old hay barn due for demolition on site and again the 6 inch grinder came in handy.The roofing iron was exactly the same width as the trailer as well so it was a no brainer when fitting it.Everything was secured by metal roofing screws as they have the tip that screws into steel and made all connections even stronger.

Next came the door way.As I have seen with so many chicken houses,it is always a struggle to get in or out as access points are always too small for most people.They seem to be designed for kids as the kids always want to collect the eggs.After a while the novelty wears off for the kids and the adults end up doing it.Thus the door is too small.I always over design what I do to make easy for anyone who follows after me.So I took some 50mm poly pipe to use as the door jam but it is hard to keep straight.I remedied this by taking two 2m garden stakes (1 inch X 1 inch) and sliding them into the poly pipe.It took some hammering but thy went.This made the door jam very straight and strong.The poly was cut in a way that the ends were a tag so they could be secured to the trailer and the top of the tank.Chicken wire was cut and secured to all openings and an old screen door was sourced from Ralph and screwed to the door frame.

Some perches were added using some off-cuts of silver oak from a recent coppicing harvest.They were sourced for the size that a chicken can get their claw around easily as well as to fit into the 50mm poly.The poly is cut to fit over the branch with a tag left on the end that is folded back and screwed to the tank.Very strong and secure.All up there can be 30 chickens housed in this structure and the perches have been placed so they assist the birds to get elevation.

Some 25 liter containers were placed on the floor for nesting boxes and straw place inside.

I was so happy with this construction and it only took me a day to build entirely by myself.It is to date my most creative construction.It was handy to have all the tools available in the workshop as well.One handy tip though.”When in doubt,tech screw it”.Tech screws are an amazing invention.Even better than sticky tape.When recalling the cost of this construction it was less than $50 for materials as the tank and trailer were free.I think we had to put a tube in one of the tyre,small amount of chicken wire (left overs from wiring the cattle race),screws,4m poly pipe and a cutting disc and a days labour.

So the chicken house went into the cell grazing system which will eventually become a walled garden of fruit trees and vegetables.

Parts of the old cattle race will be disassembled to allow access to each pen as a pathway and the chicken house will move on to develop other cropping areas.These last pics are at present state 3 years on.

Looks like happy chooks and healthy veg and fruit.

So be sure to design an aesthetically looking chicken coop so that your neighbors don’t protest of its detracting appearance. Once finished, always don’t forget to remove and lose any kinds of rubbish or weeds from around your chicken coop.

When designing your chicken coop structure, you may use sound judgment in nearly every facet of the way.

For instance, you need to use building materials in which the cleaning and disinfecting procedures will be quick and simple. The doors you install should open inwards, not outwards. You do not want your chickens roosting on your windows, so it is best to install sliding windows.

A query many people ask is how to build a chicken coop who’s floors are simple to hose and spray down without much puddling? Well the secret to that is to a touch slope the flooring toward the door. This way, when you spray out the chicken coop, the water will flow out, thus solving your puddling problem.

Cheap Chicken Coops Click Here Now!

As you may know, a well built chicken coop will protect your chickens from dangerous elements such as bad weather (heavy rain, wind, hale, snow, cold climates, etc, ) but they can also protect them from hungry predators, burglary and injury.

You want to build a draft free chicken house with windows and doors that can be opened and closed as required. Ensure the windows and doors both have proper screening systems installed in them such as a heavy gage mesh wire. Building the chicken coop on a high yet well drained area with make sure the least quantity of moistness of the coop.

To protect your chickens from predators, the smartest thing to do is to bury your outside runs with chicken wire all around the coop about one foot deep. This will prevent some very hungry predators such as raccoons, pussies and even dogs from digging underneath it.

Recently, I was shocked to learn that tightly closed, Nineteenth-century-style chicken coops are back in fashion, in spite of being unhealthy for your birds and foul-smelling, besides! I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, since there’s something about Nineteenth-century superstitions that makes them immortal, but this one is particularly bad for your chickens.

The fallacy goes like this: “Chickens are delicate, hothouse creatures who can’t stand the cold. So we will coop them up in tightly shut houses, so they won’t catch cold from drafts, and will stay warm. Maybe adding a lot of glass windows will help keep the house warmer.”

It’s hard to decide which piece of nonsense to attack first. Chickens aren’t delicate! They tolerate cold very well, snuggled under a warm coat of feathers and kept toasty by a high metabolism. Lots of people have had their chickens decide that they’d rather roost in pine trees instead of chicken houses, and such chickens usually are perfectly healthy all winter, even in harsh climates — often healthier than their brethren back at the chicken coop. They don’t lay well if exposed to so much weather, and it’s hard to protect them from predators, but the outdoor lifestyle is good for them.

Like all birds, though, chickens have a secret weakness: bad lungs. Miners used to use canaries to detect bad air quality, and chickens are just the same. They’ll be hurt by poor air quality long before we are. That means that tightly shut houses are unhealthy for chickens, because they have terrible air quality (with high levels of ammonia, for one thing). Such houses are also too damp, and may be too dark as well. Like humans, chickens don’t “catch cold from drafts” — that’s a superstition.

Also, you can’t keep chickens warm by keeping them in an unheated shed. It’s going to be just as cold in an unheated chicken house as it is outside. (Okay, that’s not quite true: In an insulated, crowded house, the chickens’ own body heat can keep it warm. But for this to work, it takes a much larger flock than most of us have.)

All this was debunked a hundred years ago. The commercial poultry industry moved permanently to highly ventilated poultry houses. First they used open-sided houses, and now they use forced-air ventilation with giant fans to provide even more air movement. The small-scale poultrykeepers adopted fresh-air poultry houses at first, but recently people seem to have lost their way, and are building dank, dark chicken dungeons again. Some of these houses are very expensive. I’d hate to see you make the same mistake, putting your best work into something that won’t work out, and harming your chickens when you’re trying to help them!

On my farm, I have always used open-front chicken houses in all weather. The hens like these well enough, though many prefer to roost on the roofs rather than inside. It rains 60-90 inches a year here, and snows sometimes, and bad weather never seems to bother the chickens. Other people tell me that their chickens get sick in the winter, but this has never happened to me. Like the folks whose chickens roost in trees, my chickens are in robust health year-round.

On the other hand, If you stuff your flock into an under-ventilated coop, the ammonia will stunt, sicken, or blind them. If it’s dark, they won’t be able to eat properly. The lack of air movement means that the water in your chickens’ manure can’t escape, but new water is being added all the time from their breath and manure. Of course, your house gets wetter and wetter, promoting disease and frostbite, since wet combs get frostbitten but dry ones don’t. This is how housing mistakes can suck all the joy out of poultrykeeping and cause you to abandon it forever. Don’t let it happen to you!

The bible of the fresh-air housing movement is Dr. Prince T. Woods’ Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, which I have just brought back into print. It’s an oldie but a goodie. There’s nothing else like it. For caring chickens owners like you, it’s something you have to have. Check out the sample chapter on my Web site and you’ll see what I mean.You’ll see that the book is a gold mine of information.