Quail are not intelligent birds. That has always been clear. However, one of the cots just distinguished itself to win a Darwin Award. Last night, after feeding the cots, I counted heads and one was missing. I looked all around the basement, thinking it had somehow gotten out of the pen. Every few hours, I […]
Today, I completed building a circuit that can find the weight of an object. It works by collecting the readings from three force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) and passing them through an analog-to-digital converter. The FSRs are the dark, paddle-shaped things standing up from the breadboard. Once the frame is built, the FSRs will support the weight
Getting the PEX pipes into the coop without drilling holes in the walls was the goal. My solution was to use my angle grinder to cut flaps in the wye fitting outside the coop and in the air duct inside the coop, before the intake fan. The cutting went pretty smoothly. Fortunately, the wye fitting
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To measure temperatures in the biomeiler, I buried thermocouples in strategic locations. This is an ideal way to measure temperatures in such a situation. The way a thermocouple works is that two types of metal are welded together and that junction is placed at the location where the temperature is to be measured. At
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During the week, we had six more cots hatch. Unfortunately, the last three had leg and foot problems. We have seen, in the past, that late hatchers have a higher percentage of leg problems. Two of the three died on their own. One had legs that stayed straight and had toes that wouldn’t uncurl. Because
Yesterday, one of the quail eggs from the last shipment hatched in the afternoon. By bedtime, there were some more. This morning there were six cots all dried off and ready to move to the brooder table. The two cots from the last hatch are not fully feathered, but they are too big to be
The last layers contain a much greater volume of material than the inner and outer cores. It has taken days and I’m still not done. Inner core – 28.3 cubic feet Outer core – 84.8 cubic feet Mantle – 141.3 cubic feet Crust – 197.8 cubic feet Total volume – 452.2 cubic feet or 16.7
After completing the insulation work on the pipes, I began work on the last layers of the pile. Thermocouples were placed in the mantle at heights of 1’, 2’, and 3’, at a radius of about 48”. The ventilation pipe coils around the pile at a radius of about 54”. Between the outer core and
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The chicken coop has two 4”-diameter air vents. Each vent has an inline duct fan capable of moving air at 100 cubic feet per minute. They are arranged so one fan pulls air into the coop and one fan pushes air out. The volume of the bird quarters is a bit under 900 cubic feet.
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The outer core was assembled in almost the same manner as the inner core. The inner core has an 18” radius, while the outer core has a 36” radius. Thus, the outer core has twice the circumference and three times the volume of the inner core. The PEX pipe was wrapped around the outer in
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