Automatic chicken coop door

Posted by louisa on Monday 4 October 2010 in chickens | 1 comment

Most of our chicken-related to-do list had to be put on hold yesterday because we don’t have gills any more. It was raining a little. (The beck at the bottom of the garden was flowing insanely fast – felt like a proper river rather than a little stream. It wasn’t a good day to have disturbed myself reading a book about a weather-caused apocalypse.)

Anyway, one chicken thing we did get to do this weekend was fit the automatic door for the pop hole. We decided to go for it – to “justify” the cost, I’ve instigated Alice’s suggestion of (retroactively) saving up for it by giving up fleeting wants and as for the chore element, John pointed out that it’s silly not to automate something that can easily be automated just because I feel guilty or lazy. Cleaning out the coop can’t be automated, dusting them for mites can’t be either, but the pop hole can be.

The gadget arrived on Saturday morning and John was delighted that he could tell exactly how it worked by looking at the simple circuit – gives me hope for us fixing it if things went wrong. The mechanism can lift & lower a door weighing up to 3kg, or up to 6kg if used with pulleys – meaning our little wooden door would be no problem and we didn’t have to make/buy/fit a new door (hurrah!).