ChickenGuard Premium Automatic Chicken Coop Door – Gadget of the Year
Automate your chicken coop door open and door close time with the Chicken Guard chicken coop door. Built with a high-end timer, this chicken coop gadget is a must-have protector if you keep chickens. If you’re considering building a chicken coop, then you definitely want to check this neat little gadget out. Likewise, if you have an existing chicken coop, then modifying your chicken coop to include an automatic chicken coop door is worth your consideration.
That’s right. The best gadget of 2019 was neither phone nor laptop nor smartwatch nor headphones. It was, instead, an automatic chicken coop door, a simple little bit of tech that not merely changed my family’s life for the better, it could have saved my marriage also.
How the Automatic Chicken Coop Door Works
Set the right time when the coop door will open, modify the open/close mode based on the period of the entire year and watch your hens line up every morning for breakfast. The Chicken Guard automatic chicken coop door saves you energy and time.
No more venturing out in inclement weather to lock the chickens up or to let them out. Forget about going out when you want to chill and nap for a few more hours. Also, no more having to drive to the chicken coop if it is on a separate piece of land away from the house.
With the simple installation (follow the step-by-step instruction video) and calibration of the ChickenGuard Automatic chicken coop door opener, you shall automate chicken coop door processes at a glance!
When all’s done and said, my legacy as a professional, among my colleagues at least, will have nothing to do with my work and everything to do with the fact that I’m the guy who lives in the woods and has a lot of pets. Fair enough.
My house in New York’s Hudson Valley (“It’s about two hours up the Hudson River from Manhattan,” is certainly how I usually describe it to baffled Brooklynites) is certainly currently home to two dogs, four cats, 14 chickens, and a snake.
A Home Full of Animals
The dogs are, of course, the neediest of the bunch-our lifetime is structured around their various demands, which are many. However they travel around often, and their demands include them.
The cats are cool and can be left home alone for a couple of days provided that there’s a pile of food and a few full water bowls. Dot, my 15-year-old ball python, can move a complete week without needing an ordinary thing. It’s the chickens whose fragile feathered lives became a life-altering responsibility.
Chickens are Low Maintenance
As animals move, chickens are low-maintenance relatively. Fill their water and food buckets once a complete week, let them out to roam, and they’re great. Sure, you have to gather the eggs during the full months when they’re laying, but in the event that you miss a complete day or two, it’s no biggie. The twist is certainly that, when left within an open coop overnight, they’ll all be murdered likely. Guess What?
ChickenGuard Automatic Chicken Coop Door Opener
Why You Need an Automatic Chicken Coop Door
Foxes, raccoons, weasels, neighbors’ dogs-everything really wants to eat a chicken. So if you don’t enjoy getting home to a massacre every day, you have to make sure the chickens are all locked up tight in their coop each night. This means that, in case you have a regular manual chicken door, someone has to be home every day to close it up in the evening and re-open it each morning.
That, someone, was usually my wife, Jennifer. And that someone was very upset with me.
Because my office is in New York City, I was invariably home late. This meant that Jennifer, who also has a long commute, had to go house to “close up the chicks,” as we state, rather than go to the gym or yoga or go spend the night visiting her family or friends. This was fine for a while. But after several months, Jennifer had enough.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she’d say. “I need to be able to be away from the house sometimes. We need to invest in an automatic Chicken Coop Door.”
“Okay, yes, you’re right,” I’d say. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it.”
That conversation happened for approximately half a year before I finally first got it repeatedly. I took that long just because a) I am an idiot, and b) the automatic Chicken Coop Door I needed to buy cost almost as much as the chicken coop. I’d purposely spent significantly less than $300 on the whole chicken coop and the chickens themselves, and I didn’t want to double that expense about the same part.
Eventually, I gave in and found the damn thing. Works out, pretending your lover doesn’t need something simply because you don’t feel just like investing in it just makes you an idiot and makes your life miserable at home.
After relenting and doing a bit of research online and in chicken forums, I ultimately purchased the exhaustively named ChickenGuard Premium Automatic Chicken Coop Door Opener & Door Kit Combo for $225.
I learned that chickens are primarily controlled by the sun. They mostly stop laying eggs during months when there are fewer than 12 hours of sunlight. The whole crowing-at-dawn thing is true—they wake up with the sun, and the rooster likes to let everyone know he’s in charge – macho man. And like magic, these little meat robots naturally put themselves to bed when the sun starts to go down.
Given that’s how chickens work, the Chicken Guard Automatic Chicken Coop Door opener packs a light sensor that automatically opens the metal coop door when the sun comes up and closes at your desired time after sunset. (If you set it to close too early, any lingering chickens get stuck outside, defeating the whole purpose of an automatic door.)
It has a simple digital display, a terrible three-button-controlled user interface, and a light that tells you when its batteries are almost dead. And… that’s it, that’s the gadget.
It’s all very quaint, and it just works. It’s also quite obvious to me now, having lived with the automatic chicken coop door for nearly a year, just how dumb I was for not buying this contraption from the very beginning. The chicken guard door is really a life saver.
Besides the benefits to our lives, it’s also been good for the chickens. They get to go out into the run even if we sleep in. They don’t get eaten by raccoons or weasels. And, because we don’t go out to the coop as much during the low-egg months, we failed to notice one of the hens sitting on some eggs for a few weeks, which resulted in a couple of surprise baby chicks.
Eleven months after buying the automatic chicken coop door, Jennifer is happy again. She can come and go as she pleases and is able to stay out late, travel, do as she pleases, or just worry about other things rather than the chickens. We now have two more chickens.
We no longer have to ask the neighbors to drive to go to the house twice a day to open or close the coop door when we’re traveling. And I am a better, still-married person, having realized the errors of being a cheap jerk. I got the new iPhone this year. It hasn’t offered anything close to the kinds of benefits offered by my automatic chicken coop door.