Power antenna do it yourself automatic chicken coop door opener
You can buy a new
power antenna unit for
around 35 bucks, and with a little imagination make it open and close
your chicken coop door.
Rob
from nifty-stuff.com has all the details. He's the guy who put together
the electric
door interlock solution I
posted about last year which only closed the door whereas this power
antenna will open it back up the next morning.
What I like about this design is how easy the installation must be
compared to a few of the other do it yourself automatic chicken coop
door openers out there. You'll need to supply 12 volts DC to the
antenna which can be done with a 20 dollar adapter at Radio Shack. The
next step is to control it with a timer or one of those gadgets that
turns something on when the sun goes down and off when it comes back up.
Edited to add:
After years of research, Mark eventually settled on this automatic chicken door.
You can see
a summary of the best
chicken door alternatives and why he chose this version here.
If you're planning on
automating your coop, don't forget to pick up one of our chicken waterers. They never spill or
fill with poop, and if done right, can only need filling every few days
or weeks!
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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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