Automatic chicken coop door

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!).

John found the included instructions rather confusing but worked out that the most important bit is to make sure the position is right: the drawstring needs to be directly above the hook on the door both horizontally and in terms of the depth of the door, so that it is pulling it cleanly up instead of jamming. The mechanism also needs to be started for the first time when the door is attached in the fully open position as it uses that as a guide.

The raising and lowering is slower than we thought it would be, but that’s a good thing – no guillotining chickens. On that note, we were also pleased with the reactiveness of the auto shut-off – the door instantly stops lowering if it encounters resistance (such as a chicken asleep on the threshold) and waits for 3 minutes before trying again. (I tried to get a video of it going up and down but nudged it when I was trying to make it dark – so it got stuck in its 3 minutes waiting period and my camera battery died before it came out of it.)

We were fitting it just before dusk and given the coop is under tree cover anyway, the “it’s dark now” sensor kicked in as soon as we fitted it. We had to considerably tweak the sensor to get it to stay open and on the first evening, one of the girls was caught outside (we checked when it was properly dark) so we tweaked it some more. Last night, they were all inside by the time it closed so hopefully it’s right now. We’re not sure about when it’s opening in the morning but it’s before we’re waking up – even if it’s only 10 minutes before we’re waking up, it’s a bonus for both them and us.

It’s early days yet but it looks like it’s going to be a good move.

(While I was taking the picture of the pop hole, I thought I’d snap some chuck pics too. But every single picture I took – and indeed have ever taken of them – looks something like this.

Even when I try to take a picture of a more distant chicken (in this case, Mrs Mauve), the little quizzical one pops up. Then bites my fingers. And attacks the lens. If my camera makes it to the end of the year intact, I’ll be amazed ;) )