The Walden Effect: Homesteading Year 4. Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Best automatic chicken door design

   collage of diy automatic chicken door

I like Chris and Keri's automatic chicken door solution for several reasons. The design is simple, solid, and cheap to do for under 20 bucks, and they have detailed pictures with videos, and a wiring schematic to make the process easy for someone who might want to follow in this direction.

I've been looking at several different versions of these automatic doors on the internet and this is one of the first to use limit switches, which might come in handy for future experiments.

This is a plan I would favor because of the low cost and easy to follow directions. Thanks for sharing Chris and Keri.

Read reviews of other automatic chicken doors:



While we're on the topic of automatic chicken care, check out our homemade chicken waterer which gives your birds clean water for days.



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I don't have chickens yet, but I think when I build my chicken coop I will use a 24vdc satellite dish mover (linear actuator). They can be found on Ebay and on old c band satellite dishes in the back yards of houses. The actuators already have the in and out limit switches and all you would need is a battery or power supply with a photo eye or photo transistor connected to a relay. A programmable irrigation timer would give better control over the photo eye.
Comment by zimmy Friday night, July 23rd, 2010
I like the idea and would really like some detailed pictures when you take this plunge. I've got one of those in the barn someone gave me last year but have not tinkered with it.
Comment by mark late Saturday evening, July 24th, 2010



Homemade chicken waterer

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