The chooks don't believe the Climate Change skeptics

I often wonder about the climate change skeptics. Do they really not understand increased energy input into chaotic systems?  Probably not.  I know our chooks don't really care what they believe, all they know is that it is hot, and we have now lost two birds to heat stress so far this summer.  Doesn't sound a lot, but we don't have a huge number of birds.

Just to give you an idea, we have an open topped brooder on the back deck of the house, which has a decking floor (so plently of cool air can come up through it) and shadecloth all around.  At 8am this morning the temperature reading was 31C, and by 10am it was 39C.  Hence the somewhat strange cooling system we set up in a hurry.

 

For the main runs, a fan is just not going to cut it, so we broke out the trusty soldering iron, grabbed a few parts out of the electronics store (doesn't eveyrone have one?) and put together a controller that can manage 4 sectors with individual temperature control on each, using misting sprays onto the shadecloth to provide evaporative cooling.

The only thing we had to buy in for the system were the 12VDC solenoid valves, everything else we had.

The electronics were basically off-the-shelf, a few relays, a few diodes, a few mosfets, and an arduino (the little thing with the red light glowing on it).  Even the 1-wire temperature sensors were straight out of the parts store (we had purchased a heap because they were cheap and only used a few on another project).

The first test was this week where we had a 41C day followed by a 45C day and we are now on the third day of over 40C temperatures that is not expected to relent for a few more days.   So far, it is working reasonably well, and we hope to refine it further to make life more pleasant for our feathered friends.

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