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

Automatic chicken coop door bedtime interval

automatic chicken coop opener box close up with light option
What makes this automatic chicken coop door opener special is the additional option of having a light come on for 4 hours after the door closes to keep hens laying in the winter.

It's also the one with the most proven track record. Johan and Barbara have had it going since 1998!, which tells me their method of having the door close 45 minutes after dusk is a good benchmark for the rest of us trying to figure out that bedtime interval.


Our automatic chicken coop door opener made it through the winter with no problems and is still going strong. We got our door from a nice guy named Jeremy at automaticchickencoopdoor.com. He's got a helpful section to his website that highlights several automatic chicken coop door installations his customers have completed.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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what about predators at dusk?
I had the pleasure of raising four chickens last year (we moved, so they went to a friend), and one of the problems I read about with automatic doors and getting the timing right was that by the time you can pretty much guarantee that the last straggling chicken is in the coop, racoons and foxes, etc, are probably out on the prowl already. So I wonder what the balance is between guaranteeing all the birds are in versus guaranteeing all the vermin are not. Thoughts?
Comment by jen g — Sat Apr 21 19:07:38 2012
Crepuscular predators
Jen --- Excellent point! Luckily, Lucy keeps our predator pressure very low, so we can't really speak to that point, but it's definitely something worth considering if you're going to let the door stay open after dark.
Comment by anna — Sat Apr 21 20:09:33 2012
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