Getting the Best out of Your EcoGlow Brooder

Are you thinking of buying chicks, or do you have some on the way? Whether you’re incubating your own or raiding your local feed store, all new chicks need a brooder. Besides food and water, chicks need heat to keep them alive during the time before they grow feathers. Below is more information on how to get the most out of your EcoGlow brooder, the safe and economical chick brooder from Brinsea! Contact us with questions at (888) 667-7009 or on Facebook and Instagram.

For small numbers of birds, our brooders are designed to be extremely economical to use. Considering the fact that brooders are on 24/7 until the chicks are older, it is important to pay attention to power usage as well as fire safety. Our brooders use 12-18 watts as opposed to the 250 watts that most heat lamps use.

Heat plates like our EcoGlow are completely different from other heat sources that are commonly used, so it is important to know how to use them properly to raise your chicks. The ambient temperature of the room needs to be noted, and we always recommend our EcoGlows for indoor use only. The area that the brooder is in should never drop below 50°F or the chicks may become too cold.

On our new EcoGlow models (the 600 and 1200) the height is easily adjusted via the legs that screw into the four corners of the yellow plastic. The lower the height the more the chicks will be heated as they nestle underneath the heat plate.

When in doubt, set the brooder to about 3” for standard chicks and watch their behavior to be able to tell whether you should raise it. If you have varying sizes of chicks you can set one side of the brooder to be higher than the other, making sure that all of your chicks are comfortable.

There are a few tricks to conserving heat with your EcoGlow brooder. It comes down to placement and insulation. If you place your brooder against one side of the enclosure wall this makes it so that chicks can only enter and exit the brooder from one direction. This will help to conserve warmth underneath the brooder and still allow the chicks to move freely.

You can also place about 1” of Styrofoam underneath the entire brooder set up to act as insulation and keep heat from escaping out the bottom.

The way that the EcoGlow warms your chicks is through radiant heat, which means that you won’t brooder be able to measure the heat with a thermometer. Radiant heat passes through the air without warming it; it only warms solid objects.

The heating plate on the EcoGlow itself should always be safe to touch, so placing your hand on it will assure you that it is warming, and watching the behavior of the chicks should tell you whether they are happy with their brooder. Chicks will naturally huddle together if they are cool and will move away from the heat plate if they are too warm.

If you are planning on having a lot of chicks our brooders are able to be placed side by side in order to accommodate larger numbers. We do not recommend placing more than four EcoGlow brooders together at a time. You should always give your chicks the ability to move about freely.

If you have any questions about our EcoGlow brooders, or are interested in learning the difference between our older model brooders and the new models, please feel free to give us a call at (888) 667-7009. We are also available on Facebook and Instagram.