Upgraded coop lighting

I finally got around to upgrading the lighting in my chicken coop.

The Problem

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to have a slightly more automated lighting solution for my girls. As with all engineering projects — though we tend to over-design everything! — there should be some tangible problem we’re trying to solve. In my case, here were the two issues worth fixing:

Gathering eggs from the nesting boxes at night is hard.
Finding the chickens in the coop after dark is also hard.

In both cases, I (with my phone’s flashlight) or the kids (with their yard nightlight ¹) would only have one usable hand to open doors or gather eggs. To my view, these were reasons enough to justify an overhaul to the lighting situation.

The Solution

My solution was to add two layers of automation to the system:

Door limit switches for turning on and off the lights automatically.
Photo sensor to determine day/night state.

Now it’s time to capture some of these thoughts on paper — enter the napkin schematic.

Constraints

Power

When I first built our coop, I opted to wire it for AC power. I knew that I’d want to have capped off outlets inside for future options, such as:

Heaters
Cameras
Lights

So therefore, any kind of DC lights for this design might actually be more work (regulation, wiring, etc.). So I’d stick with all AC circuitry.

Chicken Environment

Chickens are a harsh environment! They peck on everything, they scratch, they poop on everything. So I knew that I couldn’t just run Romex electrical wire inside the coop. It needed to be inside some sort of conduit to avoid eventual insulation damage and hazard to the girls.

The circuits didn’t need to be air tight, but at least sealed up inside junction boxes.