Easy-to-Clean Chicken Coop Interior: Simplify Your Maintenance And Become Wildly Efficient

Figuring out how to easily clean your chicken coop can save you massive amounts of time and makes owning chickens way more enjoyable. ]

Putting an effective system in place helps mucking out feel less like a chore and more like something you actually want to do!

As experts in all things chicken coop-related, we have substantial experience in this area.

Our customers regularly ask us for accessories that make mucking out easier, and we have some in stock. Once you understand the basic principles, you’re set.

This post discusses how to construct an easy-to-clean chicken coop interior. We cover everything, from simple cleaning tips to efficient design, to ensure your hen house is low-maintenance.

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Simple Cleaning Tips for Your Chicken Coop

But first, tips on cleaning your chicken coop.

Tip 1: Maintain The Feeding Area

Our first tip for an easy-clean chicken coop is to care for the feeding area. Make sure it stays free from debris and moisture at all times.

We recommend placing food and water inside containers designed for chickens’ needs. These have broad bases to prevent them from tipping over and keep solids and liquids well-contained, preventing them from spilling over the floor.

(Models also have convenient top-fill options, reducing the time it takes to replenish your chickens’ supplies!)

Tip 2: Use Safe Cleaning Products

Our next tip is to use safe cleaning products only. Don’t use any ammonia-containing solutions. Bleach and vinegar are natural and safer for your birds.

Tip 3: Perform Regular Spot Check

You should also perform regular spot checks of your chicken coop to see whether there have been any mishaps. Spilled water, excessive droppings, or uneaten food can all cause issues. Clearing these away helps with an easy-to-manage chicken coop.

Tip 4: Deep Clean Weekly

Another pro tip is to deep-clean your chicken coop weekly. To do this, you must remove all bedding and scrub all the surfaces. If your hen house is wooden, allow the material to breathe and dry out for a while before covering it with straw, wood shavings, hay, or any other material.

Tip 5: Ventilate

Finally, make sure you ventilate your coop. Keeping it free from moisture reduces the risk of mold and mildew buildup and helps prevent disease.

While cleaning, open all the doors and vents, and take the lid off if you can. Then, leave the hen house outside and let the sun’s UV rays kill any bacteria on the surface.

Efficient Design for Easy Coop Cleaning

The last section discussed some basic tips for an easy-to-clean chicken coop. This next one takes that further, showing you how to rig your hen house to make mucking out a breeze.

Here is our process:

Step 1: Make Feeders And Waterers Easily Accessible

You don’t want to be endlessly stretching to reach the feeders and waterers in your chicken coop, especially as they often require daily refilling. That’s why we suggest making them more accessible.

Place them close to the coop door or entrance to your run. Ensure you choose designs that reduce spillage and prevent you from endlessly cleaning up detritus from the floor.

Step 2: Get Latched Nesting Boxes

You also want to avoid having to rummage around in your nesting box with one hand while using the other to hold open the lid. Nobody likes trapped fingers!

You can do this by using a latch to support the open lid while both hands search for eggs. Many pre-built chicken coops come with these pre-installed, but you can add them afterward.

Step 3: Use Washable Chicken Nesting Pads

Another thing you want to avoid is having to scrub your nesting box floors every week because of heavy soiling. It’s a nasty job and can be hard to get right if moisture permeates the underlying wood.

That’s why we recommend washable chicken nesting pads. These prevent eggs from impacting hard nesting box floors, stopping them from cracking. It also makes it easy to clean any droppings or bedding, keeping coop interiors sparkling and spotless.

Step 4: Place A Tray Under Your Roosting Bars

You also want to find ways to make the area under your chicken roost easier to clean. Birds can spend a long time perched on their roosts, leading to mountains of droppings directly beneath their favorite spots.

Some chicken owners have had a great idea – place a removable tray containing pine shavings just below. With this method, you only need to remove the tray and empty the waste bedding into a bin. Talk about an easy-cleaning chicken coop!

Step 5: Rake Droppings Into A Wheelbarrow

Bending down and picking up bedding and litter from your chicken coop can be a tiring experience, especially if you have a bad back. That’s why some owners use coop designs to rake waste at hip height into a wheelbarrow.

The idea is pretty simple. Build or buy a coop on legs where the main sleeping area is two to three feet off the ground. Then use a rake to drag bedding out of the hen house and into a wheelbarrow located conveniently below.

Could this be the best chicken coop design for easy cleaning?

Possibly!

Step 6: Place Your Compost Bin Nearby

Carrying all your waste bedding to your compost bin is another hassle you can do without, even if you are using a wheelbarrow. It’s tiring and can take the fun out of being sustainable.

That’s why we suggest placing your compost bin near your coop (but not right next to it). Eco-friendliness is easy when it is convenient.

Ideas for a Low-Maintenance Chicken Coop

As we have seen, maintaining chicken coops can involve considerable work. However, there are alternatives to conventional designs that may reduce workload significantly.

Choose A Plastic Coop

For instance, many people are now choosing new-style plastic coops. These are incredibly hygienic and host-friendly, meaning you can blast away muck instead of washing everything by hand.

Sliding Dropping Trays

You might also want to invest in slide-out dropping trays for a chicken coop that is easy to clean. You simply pull these out, put waste into a bin, clean them, and then slot them back into the chicken house again.

Many coop manufacturers include these as standard. However, some owners are building DIY trays on drawer slides to stop them from getting their clothes dirty before work.

The Best Chicken Coop Plans for Stress-Free Cleaning

The best chicken coop plans for easy-clean generally fall into two categories:

• Those that raise the bedding section off the ground and provide a side-access door
• Those that let you walk in

Walk-in chicken coops feel very much like regular rooms. You don’t have to hunch over or bend your body at awkward angles to clean out waste bedding.

And many also have washable interiors like wet rooms, letting you achieve a higher level of hygiene for your birds.

Coop designs with removable flooring are similarly beneficial if you want easy-to-look-after chicken. Pull-out hip-height trays eliminate the need to take bedding out through the front door for an easy-to-clean chicken coop floor.

You might also want a coop with designated feeding, nesting, and roosting areas. Better organized spaces are easier to muck out because you know exactly where to put new bedding.

Finally, you might want a coop plan with integrated storage. Designated storage areas ensure all your coop cleaning equipment and supplies are ready, saving you time and negating the need to carry them from your shed.

Make Your Chicken Coop Easy-Clean

This guide showed you multiple ways to benefit from an easy-clean chicken coop design. You learned some basic coop cleaning tips, including the value of performing regular deep cleaning and maintaining the feeding area.

Then, we discussed how to design a chicken coop for efficient cleaning, such as installing slide-out dropping trays and using washable nesting pads.

And, finally, we looked at efficient plans and layouts for your hen house and how to use them to turn complex cleaning tasks into a breeze.

We should note, though, that while these easy clean chicken coop ideas can help, they won’t eliminate work entirely. Unfortunately, brands are still working on fully-autonomous, self-cleaning versions that will also do your dishes.

With that said, you should be able to reduce the time you spend on maintaining your coop with the ideas presented here. Give them a try!

FAQs

How long does it take to clean a chicken coop?

Cleaning a chicken coop takes around 10 to 15 minutes from start to finish.

How often do you need to clean out a chicken coop?

You should rotate the bedding at least once a week and give your coop housing a thorough clean twice a year.

Can you use vinegar to clean a chicken coop?

You can use vinegar to clean your coop, though a bleach solution is more effective at killing germs.

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