Lights in the hen house

I just read the post below about putting lights in the henhouse to provide 14 hours of light in order to get more eggs.
Did you know you shouldn't use rough service bulbs in a chicken house or anywhere near your pet birds canary etc. They have a teflon coating which when heated gives off a gas which will kill birds. SYLVANIA puts a warning on their labels, but GE won't

Can't say I knew that. My parents just use a regular bulb until it gets to be freezing out, then they switch to a heat lamp bulb. Almost done building a new coop too. Gotta finish sheeting the walls, then insulate the roof between the trusses and then sheet that. Also gotta sheet the floor with some treated plywood as the floor is a shipping crate, made out of non-treated wood.

Donovan from Wisconsin

I dident know that either, thanks for the tip.

(quoted from post at 22:12:04 10/20/12) I just read the post below about putting lights in the henhouse to provide 14 hours of light in order to get more eggs.
Did you know you shouldn't use rough service bulbs in a chicken house or anywhere near your pet birds canary etc. They have a teflon coating which when heated gives off a gas which will kill birds. SYLVANIA puts a warning on their labels, but GE won't

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I read the same information somewhere Dave.
I don't raise birds, but it seemed to me that it was an even greater hazard in enclosed areas.

Yeah Dave! I had just recently read that deal, and it suprised me. I don't know how I kept from making that mistake, being as any darned thing that Murphy can find to torment me with, usually happens. Lucky I guess!

OH If it will kill birds, hey what about me, should I be concerned?

(quoted from post at 20:06:41 10/20/12) OH If it will kill birds, hey what about me, should I be concerned?

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if you's a birdbrain or gots chicken legs :roll:

(quoted from post at 20:26:23 10/20/12)

(quoted from post at 20:06:41 10/20/12) OH If it will kill birds, hey what about me, should I be concerned?

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if you's a birdbrain or gots chicken legs :roll:

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???? Dave, he has a point. What is the point of danger to humans?


Rick

How about that teflon coated fry pan you use.The teflon problem with birds has been known for a long time.Using a teflon coated pan to water birds killed them.

It's not the teflon, it's residue from a chemical that used to be part of the manufacturing process which is released at very high temperatures. So if you have an old pan and it gets heated way hotter than normal (left on the fire with nothing in it) you might want to open the window for a few minutes. Newer pans and lower temperatures aren't a problem.
Teflon safety

Don - I'd like to see some pics of your new coop.

It puzzles me why they would put a teflon coating on a light bulb? The teflon coatings I have seen on various things were opaque, or nearly so, and I don"t understand how such a coating would help a light bulb. It sure would make a light bulb slicker, but they always have seemed slick enough without any coating. Hmmm!

When I was a kid, we had chickens all the time. And through the darker part of the year, we had lights in the chicken house to help keep the hens laying. Our lights were regular light bulbs, with reflectors about 3 or 4 feet off the floor. The lights were controlled with a clockwork timer that my Dad would set to give the hens a specific amount of light and then a smaller amount of light to approximate sundown, to get the chickens to get on the roost. When it was extremely cold, we would leave the lights on all the time, to keep the water from freezing. It worked just fine.

Electricity was very cheap then, and we didn"t think much about using a lot of it. 100 watt bulbs were only about 25 cents, and they lasted quite a while in the hen house. I don"t remember ever breaking a bulb, or the chickens ever breaking one.

I think if I was going to raise chickens today, I would try using fluorescent lights, or possibly compact fluorescent bulbs in conventional fixtures. I don"t know if there would be problems with corrosion of the metal parts from the ammonia in the air, but I think it would be worth a try. It would use less energy than regular bulbs, but more important to me would be the long bulb life of the fluorescents.

If you want hens to continue to lay eggs, you need to supplement the natural light, to fool their "biological clocks" into forgetting it is Winter.

I still wonder about why someone would coat a light bulb with teflon...doesn"t make sense to me!

Simple, to keep the bulb in one piece if broken by a crazy chicken.I have had plenty of broken bulbs and windows in the hen house.We had one farm with fluorescent lighting, production was no better that 2 other farms with regular bulbs.