Do chicken coops have to smell?

I'm on a small lot and so if I get chickens they will need to be in a stationary coop; they will range through the orchard area, and will have a covered and mulched scratching run for bad weather. Tractoring or something similar might be better, but for various reasons does not work here.

Every coop I've ever been around has smelled, well maintained ones slightly and poorly maintained ones horrendously. But they all had that "bird" smell.

With clever design, can a coop not smell at all?

I'm currently planning to deep bed both the coop and run; they will be built extra tall for this with cinder block lower courses. The deep bedding can then be shoveled out to "fire" a hot frame in January.

With a 2-4 ft layer of woodchips or similar the smell can be reduced almost to nothing. What happens in my coop is the poop gets covered up as the chickens root around and scratch down to find bugs. The whole thing ends up smelling like composting wood chips. That said, at dawn there are droppings on the surface so more smell is noticable, but outside the coop there is not a manure or bird smell.

My biggest coop has a massive overkill amount of ventilation and a clear roof and deep bedding. It doesn't smell at all. The bedding is always bone dry. I think the dryness helps a lot. The coop is 5'x 6'x 5' and has about 30 chicken in it.

I find that uncontrolled moisture tends to be the reason for smells from my chicken coop and run.

With a combination of ventilation up high and deep bedding in the coop that smells are generally eliminated.

The outdoor run had some smell issues when there were rain deluges but with a recently installed roof that has been greatly mitigated.

Timothy Norton wrote:The outdoor run had some smell issues when there were rain deluges but with a recently installed roof that has been greatly mitigated.

Were you able to stack functions and have that roof water directed to a barrel that could then be used to water the chickens?
I want to do that with a shelter I have, but the catch is getting the barrel up on something so that I can easily put a bucket under a spigot to get the water back out of the barrel. The devil is in the details... always...

Posts above nailed it, moisture is the enemy when it comes to keeping the coop smelling nice. Another thing you can do is put some crushed charcoal in with the bedding, especially under the roosts, thus inoculating it into biochar. You get the benefit of less smell, and your compost pile/garden gets the benefit of the biochar when you clean out the coop.

Jay Angler wrote: Were you able to stack functions and have that roof water directed to a barrel that could then be used to water the chickens?
I want to do that with a shelter I have, but the catch is getting the barrel up on something so that I can easily put a bucket under a spigot to get the water back out of the barrel. The devil is in the details... always...

Ohh, this is kind of freaky! I am in the planning phase of my first go with rainwater harvesting. That was an additional consideration that was in mind when I created the run roof. My biggest hang-up at the moment is creating a sturdy base that can lift my rainwater barrel high enough to be able to utilize gravity to my advantage!  Great minds must think alike?

Timothy Norton wrote:... My biggest hang-up at the moment is creating a sturdy base that can lift my rainwater barrel high enough to be able to utilize gravity to my advantage!  

Hubby cut up some heavy pallets into about 2 ft by 2 ft squares, originally intended for another project that never happened. I've allocated 4 of them for holding a plastic barrel. The bottom of the roof isn't very high off the ground, so I'm having to compromise somewhat.

The squares "waste" a fair bit of pallet material, but the rest went to firewood and they were damaged pallets to begin with, so we used the best corner for the squares.