Upgrading the Chicken Coop with Worlds First Automatic Locking Door!

hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome back to the farm today we're gonna be having a little bit of fun down here in the garden area and the chicken coop so we want to let our chickens roam freely outside the chicken coop in the daytime and be safe at night and not have to worry about accidentally leaving the chicken coop door open I don't know if any of you guys have ever done that but it never really ends too good for the chickens so come along today we'll take you around the chicken coop we'll talk a little bit about it and we're gonna be installing a chicken guard locking chicken coop door outside this chicken run right here it's gonna be a good time all right [Music] the mission today is to allow my chickens to eat up all the old weeds and seeds and nastiness in the garden and poop out some good butt fertilizer for us so that our garden explodes with Julie later on in the spring so what we're going to do we've already got our premier one fencing all the way around this little section right here and you can see our honey bee hives are right there what we're going to do is section this area off and we're gonna let the chickens munch it down now I could free-range the chickens in other words let them run free wherever they want to go and let me tell you exactly where they go right up there to the house in the flowerbed every single time so hopefully this whole setup right here will help eliminate the chickens in the flowerbed problem and fertilize the heck out of the garden let me show you what comes in this kit alright first of all before I get into this box right here I want to thank you all for coming today please pound that like button subscribe to the channel if you're not already subscribed and hit that little Bell icon down there don't notify you when I post a new video because what good would be subscribing to something if you never saw it so what we have here is the chicken guard self locking chicken door it's the world-famous only self locking chicken door and this is my chicken guard again it has this little plastic tab up here and you pull that and as you pull that it unlocks the door so in other words once the door goes all the way down and hits it locks let me show you what the clouds here what they're so those come down and lock it into place and that way critters don't try and get in here they're gonna try but they can't get in here they can scratch all day long they're not gonna get inside of this chicken coop door because it's locked cool the other thing inside the box here is a bunch of screws and stuff the mounting hardware and it has some heavy-duty plastic mounting hardware and that's where the latch goes in right there and it's pretty simple so we just need to make a little box a frame out of a little box we'll cut the wire out of the frame and then we'll install this kit and we'll put it right on the outside of the chicken coop also inside the box here hopefully I don't drop any of this stuff down in the coop is the controller right here so this is the controller and it basically has this piece of it's almost like paracord but evidently it's UV protected this is the extreme duty one right here so you hit the power button turn it on and it has a little sensor here for day and night you can program this thing to raise the door in the morning and drop it after sundown after the chickens have gone back into roost or you can program it to come open at any time of day and close at sundown again and or you can program it to open and close whenever you want to pretty cool case you got rabbits or something like that I don't know chickens will go back to roost at sundown pretty much consistently all the time so if you've established your chickens in their chicken coop they're gonna go back there to their roost at sundown whether they learn where the door is or not sometimes that's a little bit of a struggle so hopefully since we've got them all contained in this area they'll go in and out this door they'll get used to it throughout the day today and they'll go back in and roost tonight cool we're going through our paperwork warranty it's got a three year warranty that's awesome and instructions and they come in like a 50,000 different languages but the language you want is right in the front English so we'll go ahead and read that real quick should be pretty simple basically you just program it to the height of the string that you want the string to be and inside this mechanism is a battery pack that should last for a very long time and a little reel that rolls this tiny string up and that's why the string is so tiny cool now I'm reading through the instructions right here and it tells me that there's also an override on this system in case you get a lot of icy weather and stuff like that if your chickens are out there eating ice I guess there's a way you can disengage the self-locking door so that critters can get in your chicken coop seems like a no-brainer to me I wouldn't have bought a self-locking door if I wanted one that didn't lock so what we have here this is the track that it rides in and it basically slides up and down in this track there are two pieces of it and they just kind of slip together pretty simply cool right on just like I guess Legos almost Legos there we go so there's our track and all we have to do is install the track we're just going to take two pieces of board and make ourselves a little track area right here now folks bear with me here you don't have to get all hung up on the math you can just wing it that's what I'm doing here really don't need to read a whole lot of instructions all I need to do is cut to two by four pieces about the length of the track right here I'll show you exactly what I do okay so here is the track system and the track system is about 24 inches so we're gonna take it two by four and cut to 24 inch sections I am using a treated wood because it's going to be out in the weather the chickens aren't going to be eating the treated wood and treated wood nowadays is not like treated wood was years and years ago so not all those toxins and poisons in there at some point here on the channel we're going to be visiting a factory that makes treated lumber and treated post and we'll show you how that's done that'd be pretty fun now we need to go with the width of a chicken guard door and get ourselves all set up to see how wide the top of this will be so in other words we're just going to build a big you it's going to be upside down and our measurement is one clip we're going to be using my little pile of screws right here so this is a case that I keep all of my nuts and bolts and screws and whenever I buy something I will inevitably have a bunch of screws and stuff left over or I'll use a higher quality screw than what comes in the factory these are good screws by the way but I will put all that stuff in here and that way I can just grab this little container right here and go that makes life so so much easier so we've got some extra long wood screws right here okay so this would be the top we know that's going to be the top so we'll go ahead and get our screws lined up ready to go there we go these are just deck screws out door tight they'll definitely outlast the chicken coop we want to use nails you can use nails I've just found that nails tend to back out where screws won't ever back out this is a probably 20 minute install with about 10 minutes of good planning go frame is nice it's snug it's good to go now we'll put our chicken guard door on it I'm gonna try and square it up as even as we possibly can on its frame I'm gonna put two screws here and two screws here and make sure that it slides like it's supposed to I don't think we'll have any troubles comes with all that mounting hardware right here just part of it one more screw and we'll test the door what we'll drop one more screw then we'll test the door it's locked in place right now but pull that yeah it's a little on the snug side up top so we're gonna spread this guy out just a little bit now one more test that's why we test it before we install yeah baby okay so this releases the lock when it closes down locks itself back in place so we slide up and down and we lock in place pretty simple let's go put it in the coop one regret I do have building this coop is the height of the roof I also brought some cardboard in here because I don't want to absorb a chicken manure through my pants okay so you'll see we've got cage right here that's going to be in the way so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna go ahead slide it into place where we want it and we know that we're gonna have to staple some wire to this frame right here and that's upside down there dummy there you go good stuff okay so we'll slip this guy into place where he needs to be and we'll cut our wire I can pretty much tell exactly where it needs to be here so I'm gonna cut my wire so that it's up and out of the way you can only cut wire once so you better cut it in the right place I'm always trying to do a nice neat job if you possibly can even though it's the chicken coop it's not the Taj Mahal you still want to do a nice neat job push our wire out of the way and we'll pull that off once we get the door installed make sure we're all clear of debris right here we're going to take our wires and we're gonna bend them back so we can get our door in place we did this on purpose we bent why on purpose and we left some what I call pigtails on the end so that we could staple the wire to this little frame and all we're gonna do now I got me a bucket full of screws we're gonna screw it into place now you want to be careful with your screws you want to make sure you're screwing in a place it's safe for your chickens so you don't want your chickens to catch their feet or comb or anything on a screw so you want to make sure you're not leaving anything that can harm the chicken very nice snug is a bug now we've got to take staples and staple our wire into place right here you're gonna laugh but all I have is electrical staples so we'll staple our wire down up against the chicken coop like it should be and then we'll install the electronics so the next step that I'm going to have to make is a mounting plate and we cut another 1 foot board right here and we're just gonna screw that to the top of the outside of the chicken run here there we go now that is nice and secure and we'll have a mounting point to mount our chicken guard here's where you have to get out your owner's manual and you basically DoubleTap right here and you set all your limits so what we'll do is run the string all the way out and we'll tie on and then we'll set our limits to what is open and what is closed Center it over top of the door and zip some screws in again it's a chicken coop not the Taj Mahal but you want to be proud of your work and you want to be able to access this easily so if you need to change the batteries out you just undo four screws and swap out the batteries I'm curious about how long the batteries should work but according to all my sources it's about a year on batteries now I'm running out my cord here basically just nylon string I'm going to tie a couple knots in here so she doesn't get loose on me awesome you see it coming up that's my fully up position it says press up or down to move the door press menu when fully open OOP now press down to move the door this is very simple now that's automatically doing it so we just pressed the down button right here and it lowers the door down right there and then we press up there is a nice big gap right there for critters to go in so we have to close that gap up by putting that piece of scrap wire that we just pulled out right in that place so all we do with our scrap piece is we'll loosen up the track system here and we'll go in behind our wire that we used to pull the door up loosen up that track system drop that piece of scrap right down in behind the track system and then we'll screw the track system back into place your must that extra and then we'll run a couple staples right across here and then we're good to go awesome guys let's take you around the chicken coop real quick before we go this is the outside run in it's an 8 by 8 outside chicken run by 4 feet tall if I had to do this again I would have made it a full eight feet tall so that I could get in there and shovel out the manure without having to duck but it's still okay on top here we have some gourds drying for the winter those were there from last winter so we've got all the good gourds and this will slowly rot but I have it up here to keep shade on the birds and also in the summertime will grow gourds out over top of this so that we have shade on the birds now our nesting boxes are right here very easily accessible just raise it up boom you're right in there you don't have to go in the chicken coop to get the eggs now there's a sliding door and you'll see that open here in just a minute but inside the coop it's nasty right now because I haven't cleaned it in a little while but it's designed so that you can pull this wheelbarrow which I store under here out and rake all the manure right into the wheelbarrow and put it right on the garden so everything is in close proximity so you're not moving a lot of material let's open this up and these birds are ready to go out so we're going to go ahead and pull the little string that I have attached to raised the door inside the coop it's a 4 by 8 we'll pull this string I've got to wash your hook to it and it'll raise that door and the birds can go out and we just hook our little washer onto a nail right down here and now they have free reign to run out pretty cool those are the roosting poles and those are the nesting boxes this board comes out right here so we can rake all the manure right into the wheelbarrow now the outside run that's what houses the water so we just opened this door right here and set in some water pretty simple the birds have been inside all day long so I anticipate they'll be pretty excited about going outside their new door so on the outside you see there's open air so there's a lot of open air space to keep air moving in there in the winter time if it gets too cold we'll just staple plastic up there but typically it doesn't get that cold around here in North Carolina so if it's down below like five degrees will and windy will wrap it up but otherwise the birds do just fine this is premiere one poultry netting right here and we'll wrap the whole garden up in premiere one poultry netting and energize it so that the birds don't get out and that they're safe these are our honeybees and our orchard is right down here so our honeybees are right above our orchard in case they ever swarm they swarm and land on a fruit tree and a low-lying limb and we can capture the swarm pretty cool stuff you may have noticed a little bee box on top of the chicken coop that's to trap swarms it has swarm bait in it we don't have to worry about that this time of year though guys thanks a lot for joining me here on the Stoney Ridge farm I hope you enjoyed this I hope the birds are going to enjoy this this is gonna be pretty fun and now you know how to install a self-locking automatic chicken coop door pretty cool that way we don't mess up and leave the door open and come out here and see the carnage it's bad news thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on the Stoney Ridge Oh [Music] you see this right chickens are like little velociraptors they're testing the fence they'll go all the way around the whole fence and try to find a way out and that way they can pace back and forth after they get out trying to get back in chickens man tough cheese key