We made the switch from heat lamps to a chicken brooder heating plate. Read on to find out why we made the switch and how we have found using the Brinsea EcoGlow chick brooder.
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What Is A Chicken Brooder?
A chicken brooder plate is an alternative method to keeping your chicks warm. Baby chickens can’t control their body temperatures and they need to be kept warm 90-95°F for the first week of their life and decreasing the temperature by 5°F each week until they are fully feathered out.
The original chicken brooder is a broody mama hen but for most backyard chicken keepers buying chicks from the feed store or directly from a hatchery, mama hens are in short supply. A chicken brooder plate is a great alternative.
Keeping Chicks Warm
Let’s roll back a couple of years to our first chicken flock in Utah because we used a heat lamp there to keep the chicks warm and it worked well. We had a brooder box set up, a sturdy method to hold and adjust the height of the heat lamp to moderate the temperature but I was coming home every day from work at lunch to check that the heat lamp was ok, and that nothing had fallen.
I was scared to death that the house was going to burn down from the heat lamp! I wish I had known about this method of keeping chickens warm and now we live rurally, and in a colder climate, we wanted to make sure that our chicks would be warm and safe without all the extra headache of running heat lamps. Enter the Brinsea EcoGlow Safety Chick Brooder!
How a chicken brooder works
Brooders work a bit differently than a heat lamp, the chicks need to be able to come into contact with the warming plate underneath the brooder. It works like a mother hen sharing warmth with the chicks underneath her in the nest using radiant heat. The Brinsea EcoGlow has screw-threaded legs that can be easily adjusted to change the height of your chicks as they grow.
These brooders work best when the ambient temperatures in the room are above 50F, especially on a night when the temperatures dip. We set the chick brooder up and plugged it in to start warming up the evening before the chicks were due to arrive. Yes, you read that right, we needed to give the unit time to warm up and get to the right temperature before the chicks arrived at the post office. Since we were not totally sure what time the postmaster was going to call, we had everything set up and warming in our 40-gallon storage tote brooder boxes.
When setting up the brooder for your new chicks, the panel needs to be low down so it can touch the chicks. The brooder panel doesn’t want to be too low however, there needs to be at least 1 1/8” (3 cm) between the brooder and the wood shavings or straw used as litter in the bottom of the brooder box. We keep standard-sized chickens so we set the brooder to be about 3 “ (8 cm) high. The chicks move around under the brooder and find the spot that is the right temperature for them.
As the chicks grow, we adjust the height of the legs to keep the chicks warm and comfortable until they have their feathers and we can put the chicks out into the big coop.
The Pros and Cons
These chicken brooder plates have worked really well for us in our tote brooder box setup. We have the EcoGlow Safety 1200 chick brooder that is for up to 35 chicks and we have one in each tote, one for the meat birds and one for the layers. I think the 35 chick is ambitious for these chicken brooder plates. We had 25 standard-sized chickens under one and it was very cramped so we split out our faster-growing broilers (meat birds) and the slower-growing layers into 2 brooder boxes.
It is really important to read the instructions for the height you need to set up these units so that the heating plate underneath can touch the chicks. Too high and they can’t get warm and you risk losing your birds because baby chickens can’t regulate their body temperature.
We found that as the chicks got bigger, they would sit on the top of the brooder. Since chickens can be messy with poop, the Brinsea EcoGlow chick brooder comes with a clear plastic cover to protect the brooder. When cleaning the brooder box out, we take off the plastic cover and thoroughly clean and dry it before replacing it back on the brooder.
We found that even running 2 of these chick brooders is cheaper on the electric bill than a regular heat lamp so if you are looking at raising chickens on a budget, don’t dismiss the costs of running a 250W heat lamp for 24 hours versus running one of these chick brooders and which heating method will be most cost-effective and time efficient for your homestead set up.
Rundown of the pros
So let’s run down the advantages of using a Brinsea EcoGlow Safety chicken brooder:
- lower electric running costs versus heating lamps
- lower risk of the chicks overheating
- natural sleep cycles (no additional light)
- can adjust the height as the chicks grow
- reduced hazards of fire
- less work from you having to check temperatures and change the height of a lamp
- chicks can freely move around to find a temperature that is just right for them
- multiple sizes are available for your chicken brooder box and setup
- easy to clean
Learn More
Learn more about keeping chickens with these posts:
- Raising Chickens In Your Backyard
- Why A Mobile Chicken Tractor Is Better Than A Coop
- How To Clean A Chicken Coop
- How To Winterize Chicken Coops For Free
- Best Backyard Chicken Breeds For Suburban Homesteads
- Precision Old Red Barn Chicken Coop Review
How do you keep your chicks warm? Let me know over in the Facebook group
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