We’ve had our Omlet Eglu Cube for a while now, and it’s been home to our three chickens – Barbara, Margot and Gerry – for the last month. So how has it stood up in that time?
On the whole, we have been very impressed. The chickens certainly seem to be happy in it, with sufficient room to strut around and large enough food and drink containers – grub and glug, respectively – to keep them fed and watered if we’re away for the weekend.
We opted for the basic six-chicken Cube, and used it to house just three hens so that the girls had more room than most. However, this six-hen limit is defined only by the size of the run, not the house, and by adding on an extra metre of the fox-proof walls and skirt you create room for four further hens, taking the recommended maximum to 10. It would be snug, but that many birds can happily huddle together on the roosting bars inside the hutch overnight.
The Cube itself comes in a choice of seven colours, including a somewhat garish-looking pink, an insipid lilac and a vivid pillar-box red. We opted for green, which blends in with the rest of the garden very well. The coop is insulated and well ventilated, and consists of two rooms. The larger of the two is home to the roosting bars where the birds sleep; the smaller is the nesting box where they lay their eggs. Between the two is a thick wall with a circular hole in the middle to let them pass from one to the other.
We chose an Omlet coop partly on the basis of the simple maintenance videos on the company’s site that shows carefree owners sliding out the dropping trays from beneath the roosting bars, shaking out the waste and sliding them back into place. It all looks very easy, and certainly not too time-consuming to do before work. Except it’s not quite that easy.
Chicken droppings aren’t like rabbit droppings. They are often wet as the solids and urine come out at the same time, in one go. As a result, they adhere to the trays and we have found ourselves properly cleaning them using a hose and wallpaper scraper every couple of days or so.
Neither is the Cube particularly easy to move. It’s mounted on two sturdy wheels but remains heavy and bulky, and even with two adults on the job it was no trivial task to move it from one spot to another as the chickens methodically pecked away patches of the lawn.
But we don’t feel cheated. An Omlet Eglu Cube is the simplest way to keep chickens at home, and strikes us as far more hygienic than a wooden ark.
Do bear in mind, though, that it’s not cheap, and if you’re buying it purely on the basis of ease of use, it may not be quite so quick and easy as you expect.
Price £595 (plus £24 courier fee)
Contact omlet.co.uk / omlet.us
Pros Well insulated. Everything your chickens need. Quick and easy to clean.
Cons Heavy and tricky to move. Perhaps not quite as quick and easy to clean as you’ve been led to believe.
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I line the trays with newspaper – they keep much cleaner this way. It also adds fibre to the compost. The roosting bars are more of a problem, being wooden, the dirt seems to stick to them, but I understand they are available in plastic.
That’s an excellent tip. Thanks.
The cube does have plastic roosting bars – or at least mine does – and I am eternally grateful for that. Having grown up with a chicken farm where everything was wooden (they lived in barns and an orchard, after all), I know how difficult it would be to keep anything other than plastic properly clean.
Although I would agree that the coop is much easier to clean and move around the garden the step design has proved fatal. My two buff orpingtons, may be because of their size, have found it very difficult to manage which unfortunatley has led to one of them falling awkwardly when trying to come down the ladder after heavy rain and broke her neck. Luckily I, not the children, found her still twitching at the base of said steps with her neck broken underneath her.
I mentioned what happened to a friend who also has a cube and she said her husband actually made a tradtional rung to go over the plastic stairs supplied. Needless to say when I contacted Omlet upset at losing a pet and hoping they would be grateful with some feedback on their design in relation to our experience and that of my friend’s.
I rang on several occasions but my calls were not returned until eventually I managed to get through directly, and was told rather rudely by their “customer services” dept that they had received my message and nobody else had reported a problem and was I trying to get compensation!!!
After this conversation I actually searched the web and found a site also mentioning the step design which they felt had resulted in the broken leg of one of their birds. So obviously not just us. Needless to say, I am not very impressed and would warn anybody out there that this coop is NOT suitable for large birds.
Thanks for the heads up on this, Rachel. I have noticed that the chickens seem to be quite reluctant to use the ladder on the way down and they tend to more often just jump from the doorway down to the floor. They are quite happy going up, though.
I wonder if a plank of wood running along the bottom of the steps so that their legs can’t slip through would help.
The eglu cube looks very very nice but:
I took the roosting bars out. The chickens can’t even stand on it.
The ladder is insane, I closed it.
The cube is not warm in winter at all; the wind comes from 6 different places, from the drawers, a hole next to the door, the roof is not wind proof and there are different ventilation holes. I closed these till summer is coming.