Hen House

We purchased our first hen house in 2002, but was always disappointed with the quality of construction; so we decided to design and build the next shed ourselves. It took 6 months to complete from drawing the design on paper, to ordering, cutting and welding the frames together and actually building it in the workshop, then dismantling it to send it away for galvanising and then on its return, building it in the field and finishing.

For this new hen house. we wanted a bespoke control system to control everything in the shed. We wanted to set a theoretical 'perfect day' for the hens through timers to turning lights on in the morning, feeds running at set times, nest ejectors going in and out at set times too; and this 'perfect hen day clock', could then be adjusted each day to start ten minutes after natural dusk. We acheived this by working with a friend who was a control expert, and using a simple plc (computer) to control all the functions we wanted. The resulting hen house control system was refined on our third and fourth hen house builds, to now, where there have been more than half a dozen panels made for other peoples hen houses.

In building the third hen house, we decided to rationalise our design, and make jigs to build all the different sections, so that they were identical, and not to do an actual physical build in the workshop. This was a bit scary when we began to build for real as we were relying on having got all the measurements right in the design. It all went together fine, and we used the same jigs and design for the fourth hen house in 2007.