Solar light - for during the day time!

[Mr Sandman]

Hi chaps,

i need a light in the chicken coop on from dawn till the auto pop hole opens, so the chickens get as much light as possible. The reason the pop hole doesn't open to let them out at dawn is because we have foxes that like a chicken breakfast(lunch and tea). I dont open the pop hole until 8am sometimes later.

I could put a sunroof in the chicken coop, but the other half(!) doesn't want one. So i was thinking about putting a small solar panel on the roof and some LEDs in the coop.

Would i be ok just to simply run five 1W LEDs directly off a 5W solar panel?

Cheers

Steve

[Andrew Mawson]

I presume that this is to keep the egg yield up?

Be aware that any one chicken is born with a fixed number of potential eggs, and although you may keep the rate up you will bring forward the point where the chicken is no longer viable.

Andrew

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Steve Our 5 ladies (LBJ's or Little Brown Jobbies) seem to manage quite well being let out whever we're up & about - usually between 8:30 and 9:15. Five chickens, five eggs per day, every day. It's our experience that feeding them 'proper' hen-food, and letting them out to free-range for a couple of hours each day has more to do with egg production, than hours of daylight.. Adrian

[Nick Odell]

Would the other half put up with something like this?

I think it's a brilliant idea (and I have a feeling I first heard of it here on uk.d-i-y so all rights respected, etc, etc.)

Nick

[Mr Sandman]

Would the other half put up with something like this?

I think it's a brilliant idea (and I have a feeling I first heard of it here on uk.d-i-y so all rights respected, etc, etc.)

Nick

That's not a bad idea!

Thanks

Steve

[dennis]

No.. it would only supply 5w in sunlight. You will still want the leds on when its cloudy. You would probably need mre than 50 W to be sure.

[Dave Liquorice]

Chickens are born? I always though they hatched. B-)

As for 5 x 1 W LEDs of a 5 W solar panel, the big snag will be that the panel will only produce 5 W in bright direct sun light. Early moring and evening or cloudly it'll produce 4/5ths of bugger all.

[Nick]

+1 You beat me to it Nick.

[Brian Gaff]

No. Surely the power will go up and down. I was thinking when I saw the description, that it was Irish solar lighting. Leaves you in the dark at night and shines in the day when you don't!

I had a solar powered plant rotator, and the speed went up and down like a yo yo. Indeed it stopped altogether on dull days. Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

I guess an SLA, time switch for the light and solar panel might work. But one would have to do the maths on likely average energy supplied by the panel (probably around 1/3 or less of it's rated capacity), effciency of the SLA and how much energy the lights will consume (taking into account their effeciency). I wonder of a solar security light could be adapted?

Sunroof or bottle lights are simpler, cheaper and relatively maintenance free.

[Andy Burns]

Then again, you probably don't get much phototropism on dull days ...

[mark]

She might remove her objections if you let her live in the house.

mark

[Lobster]

On 01 Jun 2014, "Dave Liquorice" grunted:

Well, the idea would be that you'd have rechargeable batteries in there which smooths over the fluctuations in available light.

I put one of these in my garden toolshed last year, as a vastly cheaper and simpler alternative to running cable down there:

...another excellent China/eBay purchase!

The light it provides is pretty puny, for sure, but it does the job for me which is really just to provide enough light to see to put stuff away after dark without having to fetch a torch. It has several 1.5V NiCds inside, so trickle charges all the time in daylight, and there's enough power for light when I need it.

I don't know how much light the OP's chickens need, and obviously a timeswitch would be needed too for this to be any good.

[Dave W]

Do chickens require a particular light spectrum? UV? IR?

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Dave W writes

It is about 40 years since my family kept deep litter laying hens. In those days a Sangamo Weston electro mechanical time clock extended their

*daylight* hours with a single 60 Watt incandescent bulb.

I think the idea was to get them feeding for longer to extend the egg laying period.

There was a Farmers Weekly article at the time suggesting hens should be fitted with red filter spectacles to reduce *feather pecking* of their companions:-)