Help!..Building a cool room..

[mangelo]

I'm looking into building a cool room, for roughly about 2-3 calves. I was wondering how I should insulate my walls to keep the air in? Also what about ventilation and how should I do that? As well as the ammonia smel and what would be bed for bedding? Although with the questions what about drainage? Any help would be wonderful!!

 

[kfacres]

Sounds like you know nothing- other than a want...  Do a search on here- gets talked about pretty regularly..

In many people's opinions-- you're best off spending the money and buying a real system instead of a do it yourself cheap-o.  The real deals have built in saftey measures, which need to be required. 

You don't hear about them all the time, but I've heard of plenty of disaster cases-- and most were involved with people doing it the cheap or easy way. 

 

[GoWyo]

You can build your own and spray it with 3-4 inches of foam for insulation.  The key thing is to spend the money on the safety door.  Cool Calf will sell the door set up.  Buy a big enough air conditioner.  Make the room big enough for at least one animal more than you plan for at the moment.  There are numerous posts about cool rooms on here, so do recommend the research too.

 

[CAB]

No one ever mentions this, but money spent on insulating the floor very well is money well spent. A very large % of your cold air will go through the floor. Remember, hot air rises & cold air falls!!

 

[vc]

CAB, most the people around here with cool rooms have 6 to 10 inches of Ceder down, would that work like insulation or would you put something bellow that?

 

[CAB]

Well sometimes you really don't have a choice, but if you are starting from scratch, I would put 4 to 6 inches of foam insulation under the concrete. It will return the costs quickly.

 

[GoWyo]

Depends on how fancy you are trying to go with it and how long your season of use is.  We have a 10x11 cooler room built into a stall on the lean to barn with 4 inches of spray foam and a 18000 btu AC unit and a dirt floor.  Fits 2 steers, the pee soaks into the dirt and with a little lime or PDZ once a week is fine for the 3.5 months of the year we use it.  A step up would be to dig out the dirt from the floor and but down 6 inches of pea gravel with a geo fabric or the plastic grid material and put a few inches of sand over that and then bed 6-8 inches of cedar.

When we clean it out after county fair, we run water on the floor until it puddles to leach the urine into the ground - do it a couple of times and it is fresh as can be for next year.

 

[Xx redneck xX]

Before you even start buildin a cool room you need to think of some things. If you live in a warm area and go to shows in warm weather your just killing your calf. Itll be used to the cold temperatures and yes have more hair BUT your goin to overheat it badly. Goin to hot temperatures and cold temperatures are extremely hard on calves. Just rinse her 2-3 times a day, comb and blow, feed hair supplements. Youll have a healthier calf at the shows and good hair.