Wintering chickens

[Rob30]

How or what do you do to winterize your chicken coops? As with all the livestock water is always an issue. Keeping the eggs from freezeing is another issue on cold days. Any other issues?

[Bearfootfarm]

If you have electricity in the coop, a simple light bulb in a metal or wooden box, with the waterer sitting on top, will keep it from freezing.

As for the eggs, there's really no way short of heating the entire coop.
I guess it would be possible to build a heated enclosure just below the nests

Keeping out wind, while still maintaining ventilation is all that's needed most of the time

[ET1 SS]

I used to do a lot, and then each year I do less and less. Now I do very little to get them through the winter.

As for the eggs, they freeze.

I use the rubber water bowls, each day they are frozen. I flip them over and with a stomp the ice comes out, and I give them a bit of fresh water.

[cnvh]

I live in central PA, so we have fairly moderate winters-- some freakishly cold days, but most nights below freezing and daytime temps right around freezing.

I have a small chicken tractor and 4 hens; they have a run on the whole bottom of the pen, and an elevated "coop" on half of the top, with the nest box inside. There's a roost outside, as well as inside... So far, my older hens have roosted outside 100% of the time, and the younger hens roost inside.

The coop portion is pretty snug. For the outside, I winterized with some plastic sheeting (like the stuff you'd use on house windows) along the the top two-thirds of the outside walls along the roost to act as a windblock, but I left the bottom third open. The pen has a light, but it's not for heat so much as it's for extended "daylight" to encourage winter laying; it's on a timer and is off from 9pm-6am.

As for the water, I splurged and got a heated waterer... I would have gone with a small rubber feed trough that could easily be banged out every day, but we go away on weekends occasionally, and I didn't want to have to subject my neighbor to any unnecessary work to have to look after our chickens while we're gone; since the feeder can be filled and the water doesn't freeze, all he has to do is check in on them and gather eggs.

[lambs.are.cute]

just a bucket of hot water can melt most ice. I just carry it along with the chicken feed (in a seperate bucket lol). I usually make it steaming hot becuase the chickens are last on my rounds of chores so by the time that the water gets to them it is baby bath warm. My hens love it when I give them warm water.

I also keep a nice thick layer of straw in the nest boxes and it seems to help keep the eggs from freezing (my hens like to cover them though). It rarely gets below 0 here so that also helps.

[mommathea]

We broke down and bought a water heater for the chickens this year, we had a huge problem of them kicking over the rubber bowels, so an actual waterer works best for us.