Where your chick brooder is located MATTERS

[Rancid Crbtree]

I belong to several chicken groups and Ive seen a pattern. I will preface this by saying, I helped raise our first flock of chickens 50 years go. We would raise between 50 and 100 birds a year. This year we are at a new location and I built a new coop and run for 24 dual purpose birds. Raising chickens is not new to me.

Like nearly all folks in these groups, I start our chicks in a brooder with a heat lamp and/or heat plate. That is where they will stay for 6 or 7 weeks until they are fully featherd and the outside temps suitable to put them in the coop.

I offer this info for the new folks, raising chickens but also for those that have raised birds for a few years so you will be aware of why it matters where your brooder is located. Perhaps you are considering placing the brooder in your home.

On our homestead, we just completed a new out building that will serve as the headquarters for my home company. This is a heated building (heated with an L.P. furnace) . This new building IS NOT yet fully operational so we used the new office space to place the brooder. The only other activity in this building was starting some seeds for the garden but that was done in another part of the building.

Our chicks stayed in that room for 40 days. The forced air furnace heats all the rooms including the assembly area, loading dock and furnace room. The cold air returns and heat vents circulate the air to the furnace (through a furnace filter) and then back to all the rooms. The chicks were placed in the office space on April 5th so it was pretty cold and the furnace ran as it should in cold weather.

In these groups I see the pattern of folks locating their brooders in their homes (either in the living room, a spare bedroom or other rooms of the house) where they live, eat, sleep, cook, etc. Knowing this, I documented the 40 days of brooding in a building with forced air/circulated heating and I offer this info and a word of caution with pictures I took of not only the one room the brooder was in (and we kept the doors closed to this room to contain the effects to just this room).

I will tell you that the effects on the furnace filter was incredible (even though the furnace room was on the other end of the building and in its own room with a door. I changed the filter after just 20 days and even that was past due. I show the filter in the images included.

If you are new to chickens and are considering brooding them in your home where you cook, eat, sleep and live and you have a forced air furnace, just know what the effects will be to the ENTIRE house. If your toaster sits out on a counter top, you will be toasting your bagel with the dust of bedding, food, feathers and feces.

Our building has only hard surfaces (no carpeting, no couches, no curtains, blinds and no pillows or beds) as the air circulates through your house, these soft surfaces will attract this dust like a magnet. The condenser of your fridge will attract this dust as will ALL electronics like TV, Laptops, etc.

You are likely a clean person and will clean the room where the chicks are brooding but know that the dust of feces, feathers, food and bedding will not be contained to just the room where the brooder resides. I fear, there is NO WAY a person could keep up with the cleaning of an entire home on a daily basis (like the tops of light fixtures and door jams, light bulbs in your lamps, etc) And most wont even think about the effects to the furnace and its filter and your duct work.

The images Ive included are from just 40 days in a brand new building occupied ONLY by 24 chicks.

 

[BantyChooks]

Thorough documentation, thanks. As someone that has raised many chicks indoors and seen the surfaces of items and furniture begin to resemble a garden plot, I agree that people should be aware of this before they start out.

 

[Rancid Crbtree]

Thorough documentation, thanks. As someone that has raised many chicks indoors and seen the surfaces of items and furniture begin to resemble a garden plot, I agree that people should be aware of this before they start out.

One can either raise chickens in their home OR have a clean home but you cant have both at the same time. Ive been saying that in these groups for a long time and people laugh.

 

[MysteryChicken]

I've raised mine in the basement in a brooder box for several years. Not new to the dust.

 

[Rancid Crbtree]

I've raised mine in the basement in a brooder box for several years. Not new to the dust.

One can either raise chickens in their home OR have a clean home but you cant have both at the same time. Ive been saying that in these groups for a long time and people laugh. If you have a furnace you are raising chickens in EVERY room of your home.

 

[mcdze]

wow, at least you figured it out haha ... chicks in the house for more than the first 3 or so days is a no no, theyre the dustiest creatures known to mankind and it will get on everything ... luckily i live in florida and the garage works fine, and even then i like to get them outside asap so its not so much nastiness and smell to deal with ... like now in the summer months theyre out of the brooder and in an outside unheated but covered at night pen within 7-10 days ..

 

[Penpal]

Rancid, you presented a good documentary. Love the photos of dust. You can always tell when the furnace comes on in the Fall. Dust mess at every hot air opening. Allergies.

This is why, when we built this house, we put in-floor radiant heat instead of a furnace. It is so much cleaner. I also don't have carpeting except on the stairs (glad it was carpeted when I fell down the stairs).

I might have chicks in the living area for some reason, but not for long. They belong in the garage or my office, which is on the first floor (living is on the second floor).

This last batch I bought a pen that has close netting and is enclosed, with a roof. I think this type of set up tends to keep the dust and debris inside the pen, as well as keeping them from jumping/flying out. With forced hot air, would it help if you put a filter on the cold air return in the chick's room?

 

[rosemarythyme]

After scrubbing chick dander off three walls of a bathroom, the sink, counter and shower, I switched to brooding outdoors, the chicks don't come inside the house for even a minute.

 

[4xhennifer]

I belong to several chicken groups and Ive seen a pattern. I will preface this by saying, I helped raise our first flock of chickens 50 years go. We would raise between 50 and 100 birds a year. This year we are at a new location and I built a new coop and run for 24 dual purpose birds. Raising chickens is not new to me.

Like nearly all folks in these groups, I start our chicks in a brooder with a heat lamp and/or heat plate. That is where they will stay for 6 or 7 weeks until they are fully featherd and the outside temps suitable to put them in the coop.

I offer this info for the new folks, raising chickens but also for those that have raised birds for a few years so you will be aware of why it matters where your brooder is located. Perhaps you are considering placing the brooder in your home.

On our homestead, we just completed a new out building that will serve as the headquarters for my home company. This is a heated building (heated with an L.P. furnace) . This new building IS NOT yet fully operational so we used the new office space to place the brooder. The only other activity in this building was starting some seeds for the garden but that was done in another part of the building.

Our chicks stayed in that room for 40 days. The forced air furnace heats all the rooms including the assembly area, loading dock and furnace room. The cold air returns and heat vents circulate the air to the furnace (through a furnace filter) and then back to all the rooms. The chicks were placed in the office space on April 5th so it was pretty cold and the furnace ran as it should in cold weather.

In these groups I see the pattern of folks locating their brooders in their homes (either in the living room, a spare bedroom or other rooms of the house) where they live, eat, sleep, cook, etc. Knowing this, I documented the 40 days of brooding in a building with forced air/circulated heating and I offer this info and a word of caution with pictures I took of not only the one room the brooder was in (and we kept the doors closed to this room to contain the effects to just this room).

I will tell you that the effects on the furnace filter was incredible (even though the furnace room was on the other end of the building and in its own room with a door. I changed the filter after just 20 days and even that was past due. I show the filter in the images included.

If you are new to chickens and are considering brooding them in your home where you cook, eat, sleep and live and you have a forced air furnace, just know what the effects will be to the ENTIRE house. If your toaster sits out on a counter top, you will be toasting your bagel with the dust of bedding, food, feathers and feces.

Our building has only hard surfaces (no carpeting, no couches, no curtains, blinds and no pillows or beds) as the air circulates through your house, these soft surfaces will attract this dust like a magnet. The condenser of your fridge will attract this dust as will ALL electronics like TV, Laptops, etc.

You are likely a clean person and will clean the room where the chicks are brooding but know that the dust of feces, feathers, food and bedding will not be contained to just the room where the brooder resides. I fear, there is NO WAY a person could keep up with the cleaning of an entire home on a daily basis (like the tops of light fixtures and door jams, light bulbs in your lamps, etc) And most wont even think about the effects to the furnace and its filter and your duct work.

The images Ive included are from just 40 days in a brand new building occupied ONLY by 24 chicks.

I think it highly depends on a number of factors. The first one being the number of chicks. Although I agree, chickens certainly do make a lot of dust regardless!

There are a number of ways that you can reduce the effects of that dust around the area that they’re in- the first obviously is limit the number of birds in the area. I have four chicks and they are fairly contained in terms of the dust using the following methods:

1. I have a closed top on their brooder with a fine mesh on top that helps to contain some of the outflow of the dust while still providing plenty of ventilation all over.

2: I have an air purifier directly next to the brooder, which does most of the heavy lifting for any dust that does get out.

3. I have them in a room with 20 foot ceilings, which also keeps the dust contained to the lower part of the room and away from the vents or return (I have forced air hvac).

4. They are in a room far far away from any of the rooms that we spend any of our time in. Thankfully I have a very large home. That being said it is definitely important to go into this knowing that chickens definitely make a tremendous amount of dust and you do need to take precautions and deploy strategies to help reduce it, but you also need to recognize that there still could be contaminants in your home from the animals.

We try to be extremely diligent that once we cross the threshold where the chickens are, we assume everything we’ve touched is contaminated, including the gate between the room and the foyer where they are staying. So there hasn’t been any contamination out of this particular room, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible in other homes that are smaller.