How we pick, and how you can check us
We have not used this gear. That means the one thing we owe you is a method specific enough to be checked, so this page is the method.
Last updated September 1, 2026
The claim we refuse to make
Products we claim to have tested: 0.
Everyone in this category says they tested twenty coops. We have not tested any, and we say so — here, on every roundup, and in the footer of every page. It is the first thing on this page because it is the thing everything else has to answer for.
What we did instead, on every product on this site:
- Compiled every published specification we could source, and cited the document each one came from on the product itself.
- Ran the electrical arithmetic from the makers’ own published wattages, at the current US average residential electricity rate, showing every input so you can substitute your own.
- Ran the capacity arithmetic — interior floor area divided by claimed bird count — against the space allowances published by university extension services.
- Recorded, explicitly, where a maker publishes nothing. “Not published” is a finding, and it is scored as one.
The rubric
Every product on this site is scored on the same five weighted criteria. The weights are below, they are declared in the code that computes them, and the overall score is a weighted mean rounded to one decimal — never hand-written. You can recompute any score on this site with a calculator.
| Criterion | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity honesty | 26% | Whether the stated bird count or capacity survives arithmetic against the maker's own published dimensions. |
| Documentation | 24% | How much the maker publishes — wattage, dimensions, materials, manuals — and how checkable it is. |
| Build and weather | 20% | Published materials, hardware and temperature ratings, read against what an unheated backyard actually does in January. |
| Running cost | 15% | What it costs to keep going: power draw where it draws power, feed waste and consumables where it does not. |
| Daily use | 15% | Refilling, cleaning and the daily-chore burden — the thing that decides whether you still like it in March. |
Two of those weights deserve an explanation, because they are where this rubric differs from a generic one.
Capacity honesty carries the most weight because the single most common failure in backyard chicken gear is a capacity claim that does not survive arithmetic. A coop sold as fitting six birds routinely publishes a floor area that works out to two or three against the 3 to 4 square feet per hen that poultry.extension.org publishes. Checking that division is the most useful thing this site does.
Documentation is second because everything else depends on it. A maker who publishes no wattage, no interior dimensions and no material spec is asking you to buy on faith. It is also the honest reason a well-made product can score below a mediocre one that publishes everything: we can only assess what is on the page.
Where the numbers come from
In descending order of preference:
- Manufacturer specification sheets and manuals — for wattage, dimensions, capacity, materials and temperature ratings. This is the primary source for everything in a spec table.
- University extension services and USDA — for husbandry: space per bird, brooding temperatures, feed composition. Penn State, Maryland, Oregon State, Cornell and poultry.extension.org, all cited by name and linked.
- Federal agencies — USFWS and APHIS for the legal position on protected birds, CDC and USDA for anything health-related.
- The US Energy Information Administration — for the electricity rate used in every running-cost calculation.
- The live Amazon data layer — for prices, and only for prices.
Not acceptable as a source: another affiliate blog’s numbers, a competitor’s stated price range, a forum post, or recollection. If a figure cannot be attributed, it does not ship.
Prices
Prices on this site come from a live data layer and nowhere else. There is no price typed into any page, in prose or otherwise.
- A 48-hour freshness gate. Any figure older than that stops rendering automatically and the button falls back to “check price on Amazon”.
- An “as of” date wherever a price appears, so you always know how old the number is.
- No price is better than a wrong price. Not one of the competitors we examined shows a live price at all; showing one that was true last month would forfeit the entire advantage.
Current status: this build has no live price feed connected yet, so no price appears anywhere on the site and every buy button reads “check price on Amazon”. That is the freshness gate working as designed rather than a fault.
Every roundup names something to skip
A pick list with no negative in it is a catalog. Every one of the 41 products on this site carries a “skip it if” line stating who should not buy it, and every roundup has a “what to skip” section naming a product or a whole category not to buy. Two of our pages — the coop heater roundup and the water-freezing guide — spend most of their length arguing against buying anything.
On star ratings, and what we do not publish
You will not find a customer star rating or a review count anywhere on this site. That is deliberate: those figures are only meaningful if they come live from the retailer, and this build has no live rating data. Publishing a remembered star rating would be exactly the fabrication this whole page exists to rule out.
For the same reason, the scores on this site never appear in the structured data we send to search engines. Our score is an editorial judgment about published specifications; marking it up as a product review rating would tell a machine something different from what the page tells you.
When picks get re-checked
| Cadence | What happens |
|---|---|
| Daily | Automated price refresh. The freshness gate drops anything older than 48 hours. |
| Quarterly | Specifications re-checked against current manufacturer listings. `dateModified` is advanced only where something genuinely changed. |
| Each autumn | Every winter page reviewed: heated waterers, coop heat, winter care, bedding. |
| On any correction | Fixed, dated and noted visibly on the page. See the editorial policy. |
A price refresh never advances a page’s modified date. The refresh redeploys the site; if it touched dates, every page would claim to have changed every day and the one honest freshness signal we have would become worthless.
Check us
Every claim here is designed to be falsifiable. If a specification we cite has changed, if an arithmetic result does not reproduce, or if a source link is dead, we would like to know — the contact form goes straight to a person, and a link to the manufacturer page is the most useful thing you can include.