Theodorin Maczynski

I've been meaning to make a new chicken coop and run for a while. We have one, but the coop isn't well designed and the run "runs" north, which leaves it damper and colder than it needs to be a lot of the year.

My building skills could use some work though and I've been curious to try out a chicken tractor. Decided to "just do it" and build a tractor. Didn't really follow any existing design. It's 4 feet by 8 feet.

Wanted to share the build, what worked well, what didn't, and what I'm planning to change. I used a lot of old materials, so there's some random colors and such throughout. I also made some mistakes on fitment, my tolerances were poor, and ended up adding more materials here and there to cover holes.

The chicken egress door ended up turning out really well. It's the door on the side that rotates. Very simple and problem free so far.

I wanted to be able to catch rain water and protect chickens from the elements a little better. It ends up being pretty dark, although no problems laying yet. The rain catch does work and would work better with a cap on the end of the black pipe. Unfortunately, the "clean-out" cap on the side of the black pipe with the chicken nipple leaks. I haven't taken the time to put some kind of thread sealant on it. I did the math and a 4x8 roof is actually plenty of rain water for chickens in a year, if you didn't lose any, etc. For us it'd be something like 500 gallons a year at a minimum.

I wanted to maximize open ground space and elevated the nesting boxes. Of course, they only use one of them. One notable problem is that the chickens roost on top of the boxes. The boxes should be lower than the roosts and the top of the boxes should be covered.

It is very sturdy. No chickens have escaped while it was closed up. The rope going under the bottom was mostly just laziness and will wear out over time. The rope actually broke, but not down there.

Which brings me to the biggest issue. It's too heavy! I knew I'd have to keep weight in mind. I used 3-ply plywood for a lot of it, once I thought of it. I still have some half inch plywood which is overkill and heavy.

When the black pipe has water in it, it's even more. Even without, it adds too much weight. And isn't a reliable enough source of water to be worth using. The roof also adds a lot of weight.

I've been able to pull it with about all of my might. My back went out, so my wife tried to pull it. She couldn't pull it at all.

I'm going to ditch the rain catch and try to lose weight on it however I can. Planning on having a pipe style setup for food and water, to be very easy to refill.

I should've made the door open exposing the eggs first, rather than last. A chicken did get out once through that big door.

Another issue is that especially for these smaller, active birds, it's not much space to run in. But it makes an okay coop otherwise. I've had 8 birds in it for a while which is about the most I'd want.

It did run over a bird once when pulling, but the bird was thankfully okay. A lot of that is because it's so heavy I end up having to yank it to get going over a little mound, etc (our ground is not very flat.) When it's moving slowly and steadily the birds do a good job staying out of the way.

Hopefully this helps someone else on their build, or deciding whether to build/not build one in the first place.

We bought a property with old garden beds that were lined with black plastic, I assume HDPE. They have not aged well at all.

Replacing wood every so often isn't the biggest deal. Sometimes a 20 year product is a better option environmentally than a 30 year product. Especially with cedar or black locust, you should do pretty well.

Almost everything good for the environment will rust/rot away at some point.

Thank you both for your replies!

I'm interested in RockWool or TimberHP at this point. I have a quote for RockWool, just waiting on hearing back about TimberHP. Mycelium insulation sounds really cool but I doubt it's something I can get in a couple week timeline.

Availability of RockWool has been poor in this area, but did find someone who has it locally. It's much more money than fiberglass, but it sounds like it will be a better product in the long run.

TimberHP has some interesting demonstration videos. One of them suggests that it's better at warding off heat than mineral wool. I don't know if the test is rigged in some way, or if there's a property of R-value that doesn't quite convey this. It's also not the most realistic test to have a heat source directly over insulation. But maybe it's relevant in some way.

Cold is certainly more important to us than heat, although we're hoping to passively cool the home during the summer.

A few options for wood preservation...

First of all, I suspect for black locust it may not be necessary at all, based on what I've heard.

Raw linseed oil is great. You can also char the wood. Not sure if you can combine both.

You can also put the boxes on gravel and maybe avoid the liner.

I think this is a great idea, though!

Hi Permies,

We're building a house. It's not a foray into 100% natural materials by any means at all, but where possible we'd like to use better products.

Our contractor told us about TimberHP, a wood fiber based insulation. Comes in batts and fill. Some type of borate is added (boric acid?) to make it flame resistant to some degree.

It looks like a decent option at first glance. Have any of you worked with it? Is it possible to get in North Idaho?

Should I pursue another avenue?

This is post frame construction with 8' spaces to fill. For the attic, a fill insulation will be easiest.

Thanks!

-Theodorin

PS: Not sure if this is the right subforum for this.

I built my first "Loveable Loo" (Joe Jenkin's compost toilet example from Humanure Handbook) and had a couple of thoughts along the way.

The first was why 3/4" plywood was used. It seemed overkill. However, it makes sense when you're fastening directly into the plywood, on end. 1/2" plywood would probably split and not hold as well.

I also wondered about the legs. In my case, I had plywood scrap already in mostly the right sizes, so I skipped the legs (it just sits on the sides.) I think the legs are pretty optional, but might be helpful with leveling.

Overall, the system seems to work well and it's mostly just fine-tuning it. I need to get a good supply of sawdust to replace my use of peat moss. I suspect the peat moss isn't quite as good for absorbing odor and that it doesn't add enough carbon to the pile. I don't think it's impossible to use, just not quite as good as sawdust.

I have wondered if anyone has found alternative ideas for receptacles. Specifically, alternatives to the 5 gallon buckets. The 5 gallon buckets are fine, but it'd be nice to be able to use the large toilet seats that I'm so accustomed to. I suspect the wheelie-bin design is one method, but they sure are on the large side for indoor use (depending on how they are implemented.)

Kitty litter boxes come to mind, but I'm not sure they're quite right, either. I could see something the height of the 5 gallon bucket, or close to it, and as long as a large toilet seat might get to be quite heavy when full, so would have to be cautious to not make it too heavy depending on who has to pick it up. Of course you wouldn't want it breaking on you, either.

I had some more thoughts that I wanted to write down. This is more for the admins.

One issue with AI/machine learning is that corporations will crawl your content and then use it to generate answers. For now, they sometimes use sources, but it doesn't mean that your content isn't used as a secondary source.

One thing that you can do to help with this is block known crawlers from your site. This is actually pretty easy to do.

I see that Permies isn't currently doing this: https://permies.com/robots.txt

But it's pretty trivial to do: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/

It won't stop it all, but it's a good start in my opinion.

Hi Carmen,

This is a huge rabbit hole to go down. I'll try to give some consise ideas that don't answer your whole question.

With any online service that's free, you have to ask why it's free. The answer is either benevolence, or that you/your data is the product.

It tends to be that if you pay for a thing, the features added usually pertain to what you want. And some places will add AI features, paid or unpaid.

So I would look for email and services that you pay for. There's a huge range of options. tuta.io (free + paid), Posteo, Mythic Beasts, and numerous others.

That said, you can roll your own. But that's an even deeper rabbit hole.

One of the problems with where we're at now is the alure of free. Many people would rather pay $0 to Google and have their data sold, than $1-3/month to another company that doesn't sell your data.

I would advise getting your own domain, however, so you can move your email with you if a paid provider starts implementing AI or other things you don't like.

-Theodorin

I'm one of those people who won't buy a car that can drive itself.

No wireless tire pressure monitoring systems that can be hacked. No On Star. Nothing computerized controlling the steering or brakes.

I also once had a recruiter try to woo me into a job mentioning self-driving cars, and I was interested. It turned out, it was a startup from people working on self-driving cars, who pivoted to AI for security cameras. Very lame!

I like knowing how things work and researching incessantly. As such, my tech work generally shifts to be more and more self-hosted, with less and less faith in "cloud" technologies, despite working with them professionally for some time.

There was a point where I was booting/installing systems through iPXE. Everything would be completely up-to-date. Very simple on my end.

Then I realized that without holding my own data, if I was offline I had nothing. A laptop, iPXE booted, can't even be used as a calculator if there's no harddrive or equivalent. So I try to archive what I can and try to be as technologically independent as I can from the "grid" of the Internet.

All while wondering if I'm better off with an axe in the woods. No phone, laptop, etc.

But it would nice to be able to pass along a lot of knowledge, and learn a lot of knowledge. Even copying this information by hand would be a feat. Perhaps in the ashes of the future, we will pass on solar powered desktops reading data from 200 year old Bluray discs, long after flash memory would have faded. But probably, other things would fail by then, and eventually it would be lost for good. Our Library of Alexandria only survives in printed format at that point, until it's burned down again.

Oh well. Problems for the next generations!

I hadn't seen One Scythe Revolution mentioned yet, so I thought I should at least share it. I know there's other resources for scything. I haven't looked into any of them, myself.

I have done a little bit of scything, with some success. I'm not great at it and it's hard work. I did find setting up the snath properly has helped a lot. Weight and balance seems to be important.

I think some blades are meant to be peened, others sharpened with stones. I haven't trying peening yet.

We have something closer to a weed jungle than a flat area that's easy to mow. I ended up getting a blade meant more for weeds, and my lack of patience/experience.

Interesting bit about the grass being best while damp. I'll have to try that.