What exactly does the term “transitional ventilation” mean in terms of managing my poultry house ventilation?
Usually, the term “transitional ventilation” refers to running some of the house tunnel fans, but bringing air into the house through perimeter inlets instead of through the tunnel inlets. This technique is ideal when we have “in-between” size birds and/or weather. In other words, we need to exhaust more heat from the house than we could with a minimum ventilation setup, but we don’t want cool outside air flowing onto the birds. A good transitional ventilation setup will have enough perimeter vents to handle 50% of the tunnel ventilation capacity. Some growers now have eliminated sidewall fans entirely, and use one and sometimes two of the tunnel fans to run minimum ventilation. This tends to blur the distinction between “minimum” and “transitional” modes. The difference is that minimum ventilation is timer-controlled. When the thermostat overrides the timer, signalling that heat removal is needed, we are in transitional mode, whether sidewall or tunnel fans are being used. In most mod
