Build a chick brooder the right way: ring size per 100 chicks, guard materials, curtains, litter, feeder and drinker layout, and where the thermometer goes.
Halaal Farms Ghana team4 October 2026 · 14 min read
One hundred day-old chicks need about 2.5 square metres of warm, dry, draught-free floor for their first three days. That is a circle roughly 1.8 metres across, far smaller than most new farmers expect and far smaller than an empty poultry house. The brooder is the structure that makes this small area work: a guard to hold the chicks near the heat, a curtain to cut down the air you have to warm, a bed of dry litter, and feed and water set out so that no chick walks more than about a metre to find either.
All of it should be built, lit and tested before the chicks leave the hatchery. A brooder finished while the boxes wait on the floor is a brooder with cold litter. The week-by-week temperature schedule is in our chick brooding guide. What follows is the physical build, in the order you would do it.
Start with a house that has been washed, disinfected and left to dry completely. Litter laid on a floor still damp from washing never dries out. The steps for preparing the house are in our article on cleaning and disinfecting a poultry house between batches.
Then decide where the ring will stand. Four things settle it.
A concrete floor is the easiest to brood on. A compacted earth floor works but draws damp from below, so give it a thicker bed of litter and a longer warm-up.
The working figure for the first three days is about 40 chicks per square metre inside the guard. At that density the chicks are close enough to share warmth and find the heat, and there is still room for feeders, drinkers and a cooler band along the wall where a chick that is too warm can move away. The sum is short.
| Chicks | Floor area, days 1 to 3 | Ring diameter | Guard length before overlaps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 1.8 m² | 1.5 m (smallest useful ring) | 4.7 m |
| 100 | 2.5 m² | 1.8 m | 5.6 m |
| 200 | 5.0 m² | 2.5 m | 7.9 m |
| 300 | 7.5 m² | 3.1 m | 9.7 m |
| 500 | 12.5 m² | 4.0 m | 12.6 m |
For 50 chicks the sum gives a ring only 1.3 metres wide. Treat 1.5 metres as the minimum, because in anything smaller the heat source fills the middle and leaves no cool zone for a chick to escape to.
Two cautions on size. First, bigger is not kinder. In a ring twice the size it should be, chicks wander to the far side, fail to find the heat again at night and chill. Second, do not put more than about 500 chicks in one ring. A flock of 1,000 gets two rings of 500, each with its own heat source, feeders, drinkers and thermometer, and a walkway between them.
Check your house width against the table. A 4 metre ring needs a house at least 6 metres wide to stay a metre clear of each side wall. In a narrower house, build an oval of the same area with rounded ends.
Halaal Farms supplies chicks in boxes of 50, so the table maps directly onto an order: two boxes fill one 1.8 metre ring, ten boxes fill one 4 metre ring. If you have not settled your numbers yet, the current day-old chick price list shows what each breed costs from.
The guard has two jobs. It stops chicks wandering away from the heat, and it blocks the draught that moves along the floor. Make it 45 to 60 cm high. Lower than that and chicks flutter over it by the end of the first week. Much higher and you cannot step over it or reach in comfortably, so jobs inside the ring get skipped.
Overlap the ends of each sheet by about 30 cm and hold them with strong clips, tie wire or a bolt and wing nut. A joint you can undo by hand lets you slide the sheets apart to enlarge the ring in a minute. Prop the guard from the outside with blocks or pegs so nothing inside can trap a chick, and heap a little litter against the outside of the base to close any gap at floor level.
An open-sided house needs two kinds of curtain during brooding. Side curtains cover the mesh walls. A partition curtain, hung from the roof down to the litter across the width of the house, cuts the brooding section off from the rest. Heating a third of the house instead of all of it saves fuel and makes the temperature far steadier.
Tarpaulin, heavy polythene or stitched feed sacks all work. How the side curtains are hung matters more than the material. Fix them at the bottom and let them down from the top. Fresh air then enters above the chicks' heads, stale warm air leaves at the top, and nothing blows across the floor. A curtain that rolls up from the bottom does the opposite and puts the draught exactly at chick height.
Even on a cold night, leave an open strip of about 20 to 30 cm along the top of the curtain on the sheltered side. Chicks, charcoal and gas flames all use oxygen, and charcoal gives off carbon monoxide. Our comparison of charcoal, gas and electric brooding heat explains the fume risk in detail.
Overlap the curtain past each post by a hand's width, tie it at close intervals so the wind cannot lift an edge, and weight the bottom of the partition curtain with a length of timber.
Spread clean, dry wood shavings 5 to 8 cm deep across the whole curtained section, including the floor outside the ring, because the ring will grow into that space within days. Use the deeper figure on earth floors and in cold or wet weather. Rake it level. Humps and hollows tip drinkers over, and a tipped drinker is the usual start of a wet patch.
To work out how much to buy, multiply the floor area by the depth. A curtained section of 3 m by 4 m is 12 m². At 7 cm deep that is 12 × 0.07 = 0.84 cubic metres of shavings. Avoid fine sawdust for young chicks, since they eat it and it is dusty, and reject anything that smells musty. Choosing materials and keeping the floor dry for the rest of the batch is covered in our litter management guide.
Inside the ring, cover the litter with plain paper for the first three days. Chicks find feed scattered on paper quickly because they see it and hear it under their feet, they do not fill their crops with shavings, and you can read their droppings easily. Lay the paper on top of the litter, never on bare concrete. A smooth, cold, hard surface is slippery under a day-old chick and is a known cause of splayed legs. Overlap the sheets, and roll the paper up and remove it on day 3 or 4, sooner if it is wet and matted.
Which heat source to buy is a separate decision. Here the question is where it goes. The aim is a gradient: warmest at the centre and a few degrees cooler at the guard, so each chick can choose its own comfort. A ring that is the same temperature everywhere gives an overheated chick nowhere to go.
As a rule, the guard should stand 60 to 90 cm out from the edge of the heat source. If your ring size and heat source do not allow that, the ring is too small for the heater.
Think of the ring as a wheel. The heat is the hub, the guard is the rim, and the feeders and drinkers sit along the spokes in the band between the two. Alternate them: feed, water, feed, water. A chick walking away from the heat in any direction should meet both within a metre.
Check the light at the same time. A tray standing in shadow is a tray chicks do not use in the first two days.
A thermometer hung at eye level measures air the chicks never touch. Warm air rises, so the reading at 1.5 metres can be several degrees above the reading at the litter. Chicks live in the bottom 10 cm of the house, and that is where to measure.
On the first day a typical target is about 32 to 34°C at the first position, with the second a few degrees lower. If both read the same, the heat is set too high for the size of the ring. A minimum and maximum thermometer is worth its price, because it records how low the temperature fell at four in the morning while nobody was watching.
Light the heat at least three to four hours before the chicks arrive in warm, dry weather, and 12 to 24 hours ahead in the rains, during harmattan nights or on an earth floor. Then go through the ring as if you were a chick.
Once the chicks are in, they are the final instrument. Spread evenly and cheeping quietly, the build is right. Packed under the heat, pressed against the guard or crowded to one side, something needs adjusting. How to read them through the first day is in our hour-by-hour plan for receiving day-old chicks.
A well-started broiler chick weighs four times its hatch weight or more by day 7. The ring that fitted on day 1 is crowded by day 4, and crowding shows up as wet litter and chicks queuing at feeders. Widen the ring a little and often, not in one large jump.
| Age | Chicks per m² | Area per 100 chicks | Ring diameter for 100 chicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Days 1 to 3 | 40 | 2.5 m² | 1.8 m |
| Days 4 to 6 | 30 | 3.3 m² | 2.1 m |
| Days 7 to 9 | 20 | 5.0 m² | 2.5 m |
| Days 10 to 14 | 15 | 6.7 m² | 2.9 m, or guard removed |
These figures are a typical pattern. Chick behaviour and the weather decide the pace. When you expand:
In warm weather the guard usually comes out between day 10 and day 14. In cold or wet spells leave it until day 14 to 21. The partition curtain then moves back a few metres at a time until the flock has the full house at about three to four weeks.
| What you see | Likely fault in the build | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Chicks packed on one side of the ring | Draught from the opposite side: a gap in the guard or a loose curtain edge | Find it with the tissue test and seal it |
| Wet circles of litter round drinkers by day 3 | Drinkers sitting on uneven litter, or left too low | Level base, raise onto a board, replace the wet litter |
| Dead chicks in a heap at one point of the guard | A joint has formed a corner, or part of the guard has sagged inwards | Reshape the curve and prop from outside |
A brooder built to these measurements costs little more than a careless one, and most of it can be reused for the next batch. When you order from Halaal Farms we confirm the hatch date and delivery before you pay, so you know which morning to light the heat. If you would like a second opinion on your ring size or layout first, send the order form or call 024 915 1503, and ask about our broiler chicks or any other breed while you are at it.
You can in a very small room, but you lose control. Without a guard, chicks wander into cold corners, and when they are chilled or frightened they pile into those corners and the ones underneath suffocate. If you must brood without a ring, round off every corner with a curved piece of cardboard or hardboard and keep feed, water and heat close together in the middle of the floor.
Keep each ring to about 500 chicks or fewer. Above that, a single heat source cannot cover the area evenly, weak chicks are hard to spot in the crowd, and one fright can pile a dangerous number of birds. For 1,000 chicks, build two rings of 500 or three smaller ones, each with its own heat, feeders, drinkers and thermometer.
At least three to four hours ahead in warm, dry weather, and 12 to 24 hours ahead during the rains, on cold harmattan nights or on an earth floor. Air warms in minutes but litter and concrete take hours. Push your hand through the litter to the floor. If the floor still feels cold, the chicks will lose heat through their feet and bellies.
In warm weather most farmers take the guard out between day 10 and day 14, once chicks move confidently and return to the heat on their own. In cold, wet or windy weather leave it until day 14 to 21. After removing it, block the corners of the curtained section with curved boards for another week, because young birds still pile when startled.
Written by the Halaal Farms Ghana team. We hatch and import day-old chicks at Opeikuma, Kasoa, and deliver to all 16 regions. This article is general guidance for farmers. For diagnosis and treatment of sick birds, speak to a vet or your district veterinary office.
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