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Weekend projects: Chicken Squisher 3000

(lcamtuf.substack.com)
88 points robinhouston | 1 comments | 14 Oct 25 09:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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ternus ◴[21 Oct 25 23:18 UTC] No.45663015[source]▶
Great project! If you don't feel like building your own chicken squisher, there are commercially-available automatic coop doors that you can buy on Amazon. The one I got is Tuya-based, making it easy to integrate into Home Assistant.

Five days after installing it (and thus enabling the chickens to access the outer yard) they were carried away by predators. The 8ft+ wire yard fence didn't extend far enough into the ground to prevent something from tunneling under it.

replies(1): >>45663282 #
1. Wistar ◴[21 Oct 25 23:53 UTC] No.45663282[source]▶
I had a neighbor a few doors down who ended up pouring a concrete slab for their coop because rats were tunneling in to the coop. He ended up sinking 12" of stainless mesh into the ground around the slab to stop the rats. The rats also did $15K damage to his crawl space and a few thousand dollars damage to that of a directly next-door neighbor. The torches and pitchforks soon came out because the suburban chickens experiment caused the whole neighborhood to become overwhelmed with rats.

This was back in COVID times and the exterminators said the infestation was made much more severe than normal because all the restaurants in the area were closed down and the usual rat food sources disappeared forcing the rats out into the residential neighborhoods. Some of the rats never left and, even today, we are still having to trap them.

Fun times.