Lighting Your Chicken Coop in Winter

A matter of much debate among chicken keepers is whether or not to use electric lights in winter to encourage hens to keep laying. Let’s look at some facts and bust some myths about lighting your chicken coop in winter.

Winter Eggs, or Not

Under natural conditions, chicks hatch in spring, when daylight hours are increasing. They mature during summer and autumn, when daylight hours are decreasing.

A spring-hatched pullet that reaches reproductive maturity while daylight length is still at least 12 hours will start laying in the fall. And she’ll likely lay throughout the winter.

Otherwise she’s likely to wait until the following spring, when day length once again increases. She’ll continue to lay until either the number of light hours per day or the degree of light intensity decreases in the fall. Either or both events tell her it’s time to end the current reproductive cycle.

The farther you live from the equator, the bigger your seasonal swings will be in the increase and decrease of day length. To even things out, you can use electric lights to adjust the length of daylight hours inside the coop.

Lighting Your Coop

Your supplemental light should have the same brightness and wavelength as natural daylight. A good option is an LED lighting strip, which produces differing wavelengths, like sunlight.

Unlike a light bulb, a strip helps minimize scary shadows. Position the strip where it will throw light on the feeder and drinker, but not the nesting area.

Dust and cobwebs accumulating on the strip will decrease light intensity. To maintain the effectiveness of your controlled-lighting program, dust the lights weekly.

Start augmenting natural light when day length decreases to about 15 hours. Continue lighting your chicken coop throughout the winter and into spring, until natural daylight is back up to 15 hours per day.

If you forget to turn the lights on for just one day, or the power goes out, or the lights burn out, egg laying may slow down or stop. So use a timer to turn lights on and off, slightly overlapping natural light. By setting the timer to go on for a few hours at the same time every morning, and again for a few hours in the evening, you can bracket the changing daylight hours to create a constant 15-hour day inside the coop.

Myths and Realities

Myth: Turning lights on, then off, in the evening causes chickens to be caught by surprise before they go to roost. Reality: Chickens typically are already on the perch before the lights go off at night.

Myth: You might as well leave coop lights on 24/7. Reality: Among other drawbacks, round-the-clock lighting doesn’t give hens the 8 hours per 24 of restful darkness they need to maintain good health.

Myth: Augmenting daylight hours prevents or delays molting. Reality: Like the chickens in a lot of other flocks, mine molt on schedule each fall regardless. In an area where winter comes early, you can alleviate concern by starting your lighting program after your hens finish molting. Or put off lighting until the winter solstice in December.

Myth: Auxiliary lighting forces hens to lay. Reality: In nature, the reason chickens stop laying in cold winter climates is to conserve hard-to-find nutritional resources. Coop lights not only stimulate laying but also give hens more time to eat. But unless the hens are healthy and getting an appropriate winter diet, they won’t respond to lighting. And they’ll stop laying, anyway, if the temperature turns nasty cold. So you can’t force hens to lay.

Myth: Hens that lay during winter wear out faster. Reality: A hen comes into the world carrying ova (incipient egg yolks) for as many eggs as she capable of laying within her lifetime. Few hens convert their entire quota of ova into eggs, with or without lighting.

Myth: Lighting your chicken coop in winter is unnatural. Reality: Chickens that live near the equator experience 12 hours of daylight nearly year around. For those hens, uniform year-round daylight hours are perfectly natural. Away from the equator we’re just replicating that natural condition.

Myth: Using lights in winter to improve laying is a myth, because some hens lay during winter anyway. Reality: Pullets may lay all winter during their first year. And some breeds that originate distant from the equator are bred to lay well, despite shorter daylight hours. For all others, lighting does improve winter egg numbers.

To Light or Not to Light?

Whether to light or not depends on your goal in keeping chickens. If you rely on their eggs, then lighting makes sense. That’s especially so where hens take a break in the heat of summer, as they do here in Tennessee . If they take another break in winter, the egg situation gets pretty dire.

To determine when to start and when to stop using auxiliary lighting, I use gaisma.com, source of the above graphic for our area. The Roman numerals at the bottom represent months; the numbers on the right are hours of the day.

I draw horizontal lines across the bottom and top of the point where we get 15 hours of sunlight per day. That tells me if I want 15 hours of light on the shortest days of winter, I need to turn on the lights from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m (hours 5 to 7) and from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. (hours 16 to 20).

To remain consistent, I need to start on 15 August and end on 1 May. Rather than adjust the lighting as daylight hours change, I use the same lighting schedule the whole time.

I find it less disruptive for the chickens to add a few hours in the morning and a few hours at night. Also it keeps them cozily on the roost during the coldest overnight hours. And I don’t have to worry about the hens laying early and their eggs freezing before I get there in the morning.

In a populated area, another advantage is morning noise reduction. Roosters don’t crow as early as they would if the lights went on earlier in the morning. And the chickens don’t spend as much time clambering to be let out before sunrise.

If you decide to delay lighting your chicken coop until later in the season, don’t start all at once. Imitate natural daylight by increasing the amount of light gradually. Add 20 to 30 minutes per week until you reach 15 hours per day. It will take a few weeks before you see an effect. But at least you won’t be without eggs all winter.