Buyer FAQ hub
Poultry Project FAQ: Bird Capacity, Ventilation, Cooling, Power and RFQs
The questions commercial buyers work through before contacting suppliers, answered in order: how many birds the house holds, how much ventilation and cooling that capacity needs, what backup power must cover, and what the RFQ has to contain so proposals can be compared. Every answer links to the calculator that turns it into project numbers. Figures are planning estimates and require professional confirmation.
HatchMatch is a supplier-neutral poultry project and procurement platform. It does not manufacture or resell equipment, does not act as an engineering or installation contractor, and does not guarantee supplier pricing or performance.
Bird capacity & house sizing
Capacity drives every other number in the project: ventilation rate, cooling load, feed and water demand, power and budget. Fix it before any equipment list.
Work from usable floor area and target stocking density, not from a supplier's headline figure. Broilers are commonly planned around 30–42 kg live weight per m² depending on market weight, climate, ventilation capability and local welfare rules; that is roughly 12–18 birds per m² at typical slaughter weights. Deduct service rooms, walkways and equipment footprints from the gross area first. A 15 × 120 m house with about 1,700 m² usable area therefore plans to roughly 20,000–30,000 broilers per cycle. Confirm the density limit that applies in your country before sizing equipment.
Divide the annual bird target by the number of cycles per year, then by birds per house. Broiler operations typically run 5–6.5 cycles per year once downtime and cleaning are included; layers run one long flock cycle with a separate pullet rearing plan. A 1,000,000 broiler per year target at 6 cycles needs about 167,000 birds placed per cycle — six to eight houses at 20,000–30,000 birds each. Plan an odd house for phased construction only if the site services, feed and processing schedule can absorb it.
Size a hatchery from chicks required per week, then work back to eggs set per week using expected hatchability (commonly 80–85% of eggs set for good-quality broiler breeder eggs). Setter and hatcher positions follow from that figure, tray format and whether the hatchery is single-stage or multi-stage. Add egg storage, chick handling, hatchery HVAC and wash and waste to the same specification — hatchery quotes are most often incomparable because those scopes are missing.
Ventilation
Ventilation is quoted as a system — fans, inlets, controller and static pressure strategy — not as a fan count. Ask every supplier to quote the same three ventilation modes.
Specify three modes separately. Minimum ventilation covers air quality for young birds and is usually planned per bird or per kg live weight. Transitional ventilation bridges the two. Tunnel ventilation covers hot-weather peak load and is sized from house cross-section and target air velocity — commonly 2.0–3.0 m/s over the birds for heavy broilers in warm climates. Required total fan capacity is cross-sectional area × target velocity, corrected for the static pressure the fans actually work against.
Fan count is an output, not an input. Divide required airflow by the certified airflow of the proposed fan at the working static pressure — commonly 20–30 Pa for tunnel houses. A fan rated at free air can lose a significant share of its output at working pressure, so a quote listing only free-air m³/h is not comparable. Require certified airflow at stated pressure, power draw in kW and airflow per watt for every fan in the offer.
State house dimensions and ceiling type, target minimum and tunnel rates, inlet type and count, tunnel door area, static pressure design point, controller and sensor set, alarm and standby behaviour, and whether installation and commissioning are included. Without those fields, one supplier quotes fans and another quotes a controlled ventilation system, and the price difference is meaningless.
Cooling & heating
Cooling capability is climate-specific. The same house specification behaves very differently in a dry inland climate and a humid coastal one.
Evaporative cooling is sized from tunnel airflow and pad face velocity — commonly around 1.5–2.0 m/s through a 15 cm pad — which gives the required pad face area, plus water flow and recirculation volume. Achievable temperature drop depends on the wet-bulb depression: in dry climates a well-maintained pad system can recover a large share of that difference, while in humid climates the drop is much smaller and air velocity over the birds does more of the work. Quote pad area, pump capacity, water quality treatment and distribution as one package.
Fogging and high-pressure misting suit climates where humidity is low enough to absorb the added moisture and where pad maintenance or water quality is a constraint. In humid conditions they raise litter moisture risk and can worsen bird comfort if not controlled by humidity sensors. Whichever route is quoted, the controller strategy — trigger temperatures, humidity limits, staged operation — must be part of the offer, because that is what decides bird performance in a heat event.
Heating is sized from the coldest design day: transmission losses through walls and roof, plus the heat needed to warm minimum ventilation air to brooding temperature, plus a reserve for recovery after door openings. Insulation level changes the answer more than the heater brand does, so U-values and air-tightness belong in the RFQ. Compare heater efficiency, fuel type and local fuel price together — the cheapest heater is regularly the most expensive line over a decade of operation.
Power & backup
Power is the most commonly missing scope in poultry quotations, and the one that causes total flock losses when it fails.
Add the connected load that must keep running during an outage — tunnel fans, controllers, water pumps, feed lines, cooling pumps, lighting and, for hatcheries, incubation and HVAC — then apply the starting current of the largest motor group and a reserve for future houses. Sizing on average consumption instead of starting load is the usual cause of a generator that trips exactly when it is needed. Specify automatic transfer switching, fuel autonomy in hours and a test regime.
State grid reliability at the site, the loads that must be maintained, required autonomy, transfer time tolerance for ventilation, automatic transfer switch, alarm and remote notification, emergency curtain or drop-out openings as a last-resort fallback, fuel storage, and service and spare-parts availability locally. Also state who provides civil works and cabling: generator quotes are frequently compared while one includes installation and the other does not.
Annual energy is driven by ventilation hours, fan efficiency in airflow per watt, cooling pump operation, heating fuel and lighting programme. Over a typical equipment lifetime, energy and maintenance regularly exceed the purchase-price gap between competing offers, which is why efficiency figures should be quoted as verifiable numbers rather than marketing claims. Model the operating cost before selecting an offer, then re-check it after the final specification is agreed.
RFQ & proposals
One written specification, sent to every supplier, is what makes proposals comparable. HatchMatch structures that specification; it does not manufacture, resell or guarantee supplier outcomes.
Project type and stage, bird type and production target, house count and dimensions or hatchery output per week, housing system, stocking density, climate and site location, ventilation and cooling strategy, heating, feeding and drinking systems, lighting, manure or litter handling, biosecurity requirements, control and alarm systems, power and backup, building status, installation and commissioning scope, training, spare parts and service response, Incoterms, delivery window and budget range. Missing power, installation and service terms is the most common reason quotes cannot be compared.
Normalize before you compare. Restate each offer against the same scope list, add the missing items at your own estimate, convert all offers to the same Incoterm and currency, and extend the comparison across the expected operating life with energy, maintenance, spares and downtime. A cheaper offer that excludes installation, controllers and standby power is usually the more expensive project.
HatchMatch is a supplier-neutral poultry project and procurement platform. It helps define the project, run the planning calculators, produce a structured RFQ and organize manufacturer research, and a human reviews commercial projects from roughly USD 250k upwards before any handover. It does not manufacture or resell equipment, does not act as an engineering or installation contractor, and cannot guarantee supplier acceptance, pricing or performance. Commercial terms are always agreed directly between the buyer and the supplier.
Turn the answers into a comparable RFQ
Once capacity, ventilation, cooling and power are defined, put them into one written specification so every supplier quotes the same scope. Calculator values you have already entered carry into the RFQ builder.