The perfect chicken coop
Not mite-friendly and easy to clean
For you and your chickens to feel comfortable with the coop in the long term, it must be easy and stress-free to clean. If you spend hours on a hopeless mite hunt with chemicals, sooner or later you will lose interest in the hobby, your coop will be swarming with mites and your chickens will suffer from chronic blood deficiency. It is therefore extremely important that your coop is easy to clean and offers the vermin as few hiding places as possible.
Although wood is an incredibly beautiful material for building chicken coops, it is extremely unsuitable because it is a natural material that works with the humidity in the air. This creates cracks and crevices in which the mites can hide perfectly. In addition, wood absorbs odors that you will never get rid of.
In the increasingly warm and humid summers, the pests multiply and quickly become a plague. The only thing that helps is poison or boiling water over the mite nests – but water in the wooden stable would only make the problem with the cracks even worse and it is often very difficult to get to the mite nests themselves.
A brick, whitewashed coop with a solid, painted floor would be ideal, but how many of us live on a farm or want to submit a planning application for a solid chicken coop?
Plastic stables can be cleaned quite easily with water, but have almost no insulation for hot summer days and cold winter nights.
We, the HeiniCoop company from Saarland, have been producing chicken coops made of coated thermocouples since 2013.
These are not only perfect for cleaning, but also provide excellent insulation against cold, heat and noise.
The stable should be bright and well ventilated
During the night, chickens not only give off a lot of heat, but also a lot of moisture through the air they breathe. To prevent the chickens from sitting in their own stink, the coop should be well ventilated with forced ventilation, but there should not be a strong draught.
The egg performance and also the time of moulting depend on the amount of daylight available. When planning the coop, you should therefore include at least one larger window – preferably made of insulating glass. Light-colored, smooth coop walls reflect the incoming light better than rough wooden floorboards.
Laying nest boxes at the correct height
To make it easy to reach the eggs, a good coop should have laying nests that can be reached from the outside. When choosing the height of the nests, make sure that they are positioned in such a way that your hens can easily reach the laying boxes from the inside and that you have to bend down as little as possible. Particularly heavy chicken breeds or silkies find it difficult to reach nests that are too high and will simply lay on the floor.
Good insulation
Whether on extremely hot summer days or cold winter nights, good insulation will pay off. However, it should be processed in such a way that no mites can get behind or into the insulation. Gaps of less than one millimeter are enough for these creatures to make themselves comfortable. Once they have got behind the insulation, you have lost without the use of poisons and who wants that?
Another important point is that chickens like to peck at and eat crunchy insulation material such as polystyrene. So make sure that the poultry cannot eat away the insulation!
Species-appropriate perches
In contrast to the rest of the hutch, they should really be made of wood. The cross-section should not be round, but square with rounded edges. To avoid arguments between the chickens, it makes sense to attach all perches at the same height. If you want to have large breeds , you should only attach the perches 30-40 cm above the ground to make it easier for the birds to jump onto the perch. In addition, there will already be conspecifics sitting on top. Possibly higher-ranking animals that don’t make it easier for the straggler to jump up, spread out, hack downwards and so on. It is better to have the poles a little too low than too high.
Predator-proof
Foxes, martens and now also raccoons love to eat our little feathered friends. Quite a few chicken owners have had to face the horror of a marten visit in the morning. A well-secured door, a solid coop floor that prevents digging and sturdy walls prevent uninvited guests from entering. It is also good if there is a little space between the stable floor and the ground to prevent rodents from nesting.