Over the past couple years I have used a heat lamp in my coop during the winter to keep the chickens nice and warm. I have come to realize that I do this more for myself! Yes…myself. I am such an animal lover that I do things for animals that are usually unnecessary because I think about how I would feel out in the cold and so it makes ME feel better when I think that animals are more comfortable! (When we had dogs living outside…um…well…. they had carpet, a heater, an air conditioner for the summer. That’s the kind of stuff I do.)
Sooo in Utah it can get dang cold at nights during the winter…BUT I have been researching and researching and I am changing things up this winter for a couple of reasons.
1 . Last year I had the heat lamp double looped so that there was no way for it to be knocked down…but over the winter I did have the bulbs burn out a couple of times. Now if the chickens don’t acclimate to the cold gradually…and they are used to the heat of the lamp…then they can die if the bulb burns out and they are left in a freezing coop. So the bulb burning out always worried me, especially if I had to go out of town.
2 . The bulb also burst one time. I don’t know how but it broke into lots of pieces and was all over the coop! How dangerous for the chickens to eat those pieces and/or step on them. So this was on my mind after that event.
3 . It is expensive! I would leave the heat lamp on all night and on cold days….it adds up.
This year I am SO EXCITED to be doing things differently! I seriously love to do things the way people did in the olden days. This year I decided to use straw….straw and more straw!
We got 20 straw bales and put them all over the outside of the coop. Straw is a #1 insulator! We didn’t cover the whole coop, but about half of it…and we actually went one more high on the side of the coop after this picture was taken. It did cover the window…but all the better to keep the cold out.
The other things that I have done is to FILL the inside of the coop with straw. I am doing the deep liter method. It keeps the coldness in the floor from coming through. I filled all of the nesting baskets and I will keep putting clean, dry draw in their coop all winter long.
When summer comes I can use all that straw! In my flower beds and garden beds. The straw that I pull out of the coop will have lots of manure mixed in so I will put that in the compost pile to make some great mulch soon.
(this is what it looks like now – 3 bales high)
I am excited to see how things go. I check on the chicks every night and so far they snuggle to each other and seem to be doing fine. It has been about 10* here at night…going to get colder. So hopefully we (ME) can all follow through on knowing the chicks will be just fine with this type of insulation and they don’t need the back up heat lamp that I have 🙂
