I hear a lot of people asking on chicken forums; how do you provide light in your chicken coop, when you don’t have electricity hooked up to it?
While we do not have electricity hooked directly into our coop, we do use an extension cord. Not ideal, and it is used mostly to provide electricity to the water heating plate during the winter months. I’ll talk about those in another post.
I do have a shop light hanging in the main coop, and I really do not use it that much. It’s there just in case I need more light than usual.
We love using solar lighting here on the farm, and these lights work perfectly. There is no worry of the lights falling and bulbs shattering into little shards or causing a fire. They are cool to touch, so they will not burn the chickens if they happen to hit one as they fly up to roost. I have them set to come on automatically just before dusk and shut off in 5 hours. Which gives me plenty of time to go out in the evening and collect the eggs, especially if I am running behind. It also allows me to make sure all the chickens have made it into the coop for bed, before I close the doors up for the night.
The lights we use in the coop I received as a Christmas present 2 years ago, and I absolutely love them! The 2-vintage farm style pendant solar lights are connected into one solar panel and shines bright enough to light the 2 areas of the chicken coop ( a 12 by 16 space and an 8 by 8 space) the connecting wires are very long and where I have chosen to hang these lights, I still have plenty of wire left over, if I wanted to move them to a different location. Since it was winter, I did not install the solar panel outside. I hung it in the southside window of the larger part of the coop, it gets plenty of sun through out the day to fully charge for the 5 hours I have it programed to run. It also has 3 light modes, a soft warm light, cool white and a natural light. I prefer to have mine set to the soft warm light; it has a more natural dusk feel than the harsh bright setting of white light. (However, all 3 settings do provide the same amount of light.) My preference for the chickens though, in having them settle in for the night, I feel the warm soft light is the better option.
The lighting is also dimmable, for the pictures below, I took I had it set on the brightest setting, just so you could see how much these lights illuminate inside our coop.
So, if you are looking for a set of lights to use in your coop that doesn’t have electricity connected to it, I would definitely suggest taking a look at these Solar Pendant Lights from Amazon!
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