Chicken Coop

you may want to post this in the farming gardening and homesteading. Lot's of good info there

I would. At least at areas they can reach. They pick at everything and no telling what they might take a particular interest in.

Chickens are curious and may peck at wiring. I'd also be worried about the mice that will eventually find a way to get into the coop and could chew your wiring.

LMAO I would love to see a mouse get into my coop! It would last about 4 seconds before the girls were ripping it to shreds and fighting over it. Chickens are better mousers than cats!

kestak said:

Greetings,

Next step in survival preparedness: Chicken Coop building. (I wish I had friends close to help me...hehehehe...I am a one-man show and it is tiring)

In all the researches I did, no where it was mentioned about particular precautions about electricity. Do I have to put the electric wires inside the coop into pvc tubes or there is no danger the chickens will try to eat them?

Thank you

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If you're going to have open walls with electrical lines running in them, it would be very advisable to contain those line in some condiut, yes. I'd probably opt for metal over pvc.

What permanent electrical fixtures do you anticipate having in the coop?

Light at the ceiling, floodlight outside in case it is needed at night, outlet on the ceiling to plug a warming light if needed because of cold that will be hung on a hook. Except the line coming out of the ground, i think everything will be pretty high, close or on the ceiling.

I live in Western New York. We get pretty cold. I do not have any heat source in my coop. The more you protect your birds from the cold, the more susceptible they are to the cold. I do however have one light bulb in there to keep egg production up as much as possible in this dark part of the year.

I stapled the light cord to one of the 2x4's so that it wasn't dangling. Chickens are stupid. If you keep the stuff out of their faces, they wont mess with it.

On a side note, the same power line I have running out to the coop for the light, is used to power a heated waterbowl that we made to keep the water from freezing.

Thank you!
I am in GA. So I guess notbhear needed at all...

Please forgive me, but I actually chuckled out loud when I saw you were thinking of heating your coop, and you are in Georgia! I may be ignorant, but isn't Georgia the state where peaches grow? No offense, please, but I thought it was a warmish place. If I'm totally wrong, please correct me.

The past week or so it has been around -10 C ( 14F) and with the wind, it is quite a bit colder. My girls have never had heat. We give them warm water a few times throughout the day as it freezes, but the only electric we have is for a light which we use only until it starts to get lighter in the mornings, so the girls have at least 14 hours of light.

Today it was from -2c to about +11c.
Sometimes it can go from -5 to +18 in the same day.
I am canadian. For us winter here is like an eternal spring...
It is just we never had chicken before. My wife grew up in the country, but she was too young to remember all the details.

In my particular case I repurposed an old storage shed to be my coop so I was able to run the extension cord I use for the heat lamp through the rafters out of reach of the chickens.

If youre building something smaller thats not possible to get out of reach I would say its your choice. Back when my grandparents were alive and raising chickens they kept bare light bulb sockets connected to extension cords with electrical tape in the coop and I cant think of a single chicken that ever suffered from it despite the tape hanging off and even exposing bare wires over time.

kestak, thanks for the reply. I thought I may have been stereotyping Georgia. Right now is -14, although they say it will warm up a bit over the next couple of days. What kind of chooks do you have?

We ran electric to ours and ran the wire up the wall through small pvc pipe to a box that sits about 6 feet up the wall, there is no way for the chicks to get that high. We use a regular 60 watt lightbulb to keep egg production up. It is on a timer and the only time we leave it on all night is if the temperatures go into the low teens. When that happens we point the light away from their roosting area so it doesn't keep them up.

I ran all my coop wiring along the top corners near the ceiling and have not had any trouble with them pecking at it.

TheRabbit said:

LMAO I would love to see a mouse get into my coop! It would last about 4 seconds before the girls were ripping it to shreds and fighting over it. Chickens are better mousers than cats!

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Yep, them raptors of mine take on anything that moves. Including scaring the hell out of the dog sending her yelping, cats smart enough to just stay away from um. A mouse, dead meat.