According to Tom Tabler and colleagues at Mississippi State University Extension, the development and improvement of LED technology to fulfil the lighting requirements of the poultry business over the last five years has been a tremendous accomplishment.
Read last week's article here for the most recent study on the health and wellbeing of chickens under various lighting conditions.
The poultry sector is typically rather conservative, therefore it has taken some time for it to feel at ease with LED technology. The industry is adopting LED technology and the energy savings it gives poultry growers, however, since there is now enough data available.
An excellent LED bulb has an efficiency of 80–85% compared to an incandescent light. However, not all LED lights are created equal, so before making an LED bulb purchase, poultry breeders should take the time to explore their options.
Given that LED bulbs are more costly than incandescent lights, you don't want to use the wrong one. Let's look more closely at the questions you need to be asking, the potential problems, and the potential energy savings offered by LED technology.
Prepare your homework
In the setting of raising chickens, light is crucial. Growth rate, animal welfare, and production efficiency are all impacted by light.
Intensity, photoperiod, source, and spectrum are the four key characteristics of light (Manser, 1996). The varied outputs from the many wavelengths that make up the visible spectrum determine the colour of light.
White light is made up of every wavelength in the visible spectrum, but the amount of power that each wavelength emits determines how warm or cool it is (how many kelvins it is).
Because of this, light is not only crucial to the poultry business but also challenging. As a result, as a poultry farmer, don't decide to convert to LED lights in your chicken houses without thinking carefully about it and getting advice from reliable sources.
Make sure your integrator will let you use LED lights by speaking with your service technician. If you can use LEDs, find out which brands are allowed from your integrator or service technician.
On their contract farms, integrators often forbid the use of particular brands of LEDs.
Thankfully, a number of prestigious US institutions, including Mississippi State, Auburn, Georgia, Arkansas, Maryland, Delaware, and maybe more, have poultry Extension staff that have worked with LED lighting ever since it first entered the poultry market.
These experts can provide impartial information on cost analysis, payback potential, and life expectancy of various LED goods since they have carried out countless field tests and analyses on a variety of different LED products.
Take advantage of this free material and learn all you can to aid in your decision-making.
If you determine that LEDs are the best option for your business, get them from a company that has experience in agricultural lighting and is familiar with the demands of the modern poultry industry.
For the first few days after hatching, the EDs must be able to provide newborn chicks adequate light (2 foot-candles or more at the floor) to make it easy for them to locate food and water.
To retain optimal function, the bulbs must also be able to dim appropriately to the very low levels required later in the flock (0.03 foot-candles or fewer). For the flock as a whole, the right light intensity is essential for bird performance.
Avoid using bulbs that haven't been tested in a chicken coop. A chicken coop is a more tougher environment than a home or business because of problems including dust, humidity, wetness, and ammonia. Some bulbs are not made to function in that kind of setting and won't be able to handle the circumstances.
Request the outcomes of any field trial studies that may provide performance data on bulbs. Was the bird's performance appropriate? Was there any change in the behaviour of birds?
Birds seem to behave and feel calmer under LEDs than CFLs, according to several producers who have moved from compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) to LEDs.
This could be as a result of the fact that LED lights do not flicker in the same way as CFLs do. Chickens are far more sensitive to flashing lights than people are because they have better vision. The absence of flickering in LED lighting could calm the birds down more.
Light dimmer technology lags behind LED technology in certain respects, and not all dimmers work with all brands of LED lights. This is partly because, in contrast to incandescent lights, which dim linearly (i.e., when the dimmer is turned down by, say, 20%, the light output from the bulb reduces by 20%), LED bulbs, for the most part, dim non-linearly.
This implies that before you really see a lowering in the light output of LED bulbs, the dimmer may need to be set down quite a little. While dimmer makers are quickly catching up, many of the older dimmers already in use may need to be upgraded in order to correctly dim LED lamps.
Therefore, before switching to LED lights, it is crucial that you make sure your dimmer is capable of handling them.
Some dimmers could merely need an update chip that you or your service technician can install and be field serviceable. Other dimmers, however, can be so outdated that a brand-new, more modern dimmer will need to be fitted in order to accommodate the cutting-edge LED technology.
Find out what kelvin (K) rating your integrator will accept for a bulb. The colour temperature of the light—warm, neutral, or cool—is indicated by the kelvin rating.
Warm kelvin ratings have orange-red hues comparable to incandescent or high-pressure sodium bulbs and range from 2,700K to 3,000K in temperature. The range from 3,400K to 3,700K is considered neutral. A blue-white colour between 5,000K and 6,000K has a cold kelvin grade.
The 2,700K LEDs tend to be more common in broiler breeder farms, whilst the 5,000K bulbs appear to be the most preferred option for broilers nowadays.
Once again, not every LED is the same. For a chicken coop, an excellent household light, such an omni-directional LED, perhaps isn't the best option.
An omni-directional LED tends to illuminate the ceiling and walls to a large extent (up to 40%), which may be OK in a home but not so wonderful in a coop where the bulk of the light has to be directed downward to the floor.
Because of this, it may be necessary to use a higher-wattage bulb to provide the chicks with the necessary amount of light on the floor (which is often more expensive). Omni-directional LEDs are often found in hardware or budget shops. So that you may make wise purchase selections, do your own research, gather information, and ask questions.
Even the cheapest LED bulbs are much more costly than incandescent lamps. Make sure you are only spending money on what you and the hens really need.
Recognise the significance of foot-candle readings throughout the manufacturing cycle and foot-candles of light. In order to measure the amount of light in your chicken house, your service technician most likely has a light metre with him.
A foot-candle is a unit of measurement for surface light intensity that may be used to standardise the value of different light sources. Per square foot, one lumen of light is equivalent to one foot-candle.
A lumen is a unit of measurement for the brightness—the total quantity of visible light—emitted by a source. For instance, a non-dimmable 10-watt A19 LED light bulb can offer 900 lumens of brightness. The lumen rating of an A19 LED bulb rated at 6 watts may be 530.
For their first few days (4–14), newborn chicks are often exposed to 2 or more foot-candles of light, depending on the integrator, genetic strain, and dietary regimen.
Typically, light levels are highest above feed and water lines and somewhat lower against walls. It's crucial to have a generally even distribution of light across the whole home, with no too dark or bright regions.
In order to provide a broader band of light output that better removes dark patches and reduces excessively brilliant regions, the LED industry is always working to enhance beam angle. The right beam angle eliminates light waste by lighting the walls and ceiling while directing light especially onto the birds.
