Nest Boxes and Light for Philippine Laying Hens

Is your pugad a heat trap?

19 to 33 °C is the range a Philippine chicken house is required to hold at all times, and 30 °C is the house temperature the same order calls ideal (DA Administrative Order No. 12 s. 2002, § 9.2.5 and § 8.3).

The clause immediately above that range is § 9.2.4: “Nest boxes shall be properly positioned and constructed such that they do not become heat traps.”

Look at where that sentence sits. Section 9 of the order is headed TEMPERATURE. Section 9.2 is “For Growing Adult Chickens”. So the Philippine regulator files a nest box under heat, beside panting and extreme weather, and not under housing or equipment at all.

The scope is the part that decides whether this reaches you. § 1 of the order says chickens “are raised ranging from backyard to large commercial enterprises”. It was promulgated on 1 April 2002 under Republic Act 8485, the Animal Welfare Act, signed by Secretary Leonardo Q. Montemayor, and § 23 carries penal provisions. Kaya abot ng utos na ito ang pugad sa bakuran mo, and the order has been in force for 24 years.

The DA’s own path to the order returns a 404 and the Official Gazette permalink returns a 403, so the copy read for this page is the mirror hosted by the Philippine Animal Welfare Society, which is also the copy PNS/BAFS 312:2021 cites in its own bibliography. The Supreme Court E-Library carries the official text, appendices included, at elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocs/10/43526.

Now set the heat rule beside the box the other Philippine standard describes. PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.5.2 b) wants a nest box “enclosed and draught-free”. § 6.5.5 wants a curtain hanging over the opening. § 6.5.4 wants the boxes “placed in cool and shady area” (the standard numbers two clauses 6.5.4, both inside § 6.5 Nesting; this is the placement one, not the nest-pad substrate one). Three clauses out of one document, and in an open-sided kulungan under a GI roof the first two describe the hottest, stillest volume in the building while the third asks it not to be one.

Nakadikit ba sa dingding na tinatamaan ng hapon ang pugad mo ngayon? Iyan ang unang titingnan.

The order says shall and then stops. No temperature is attached to § 9.2.4, and neither AO 12 nor either PNS standard read for this page puts a figure on the air inside a nest box, so a keeper has a duty with no threshold under it. What the ambient does to a laying flock is a separate argument on its own page. The box only makes that ambient worse.

How many boxes, how big, and where do they go?

Ask the internet how many nest boxes 20 hens need and one nest per four to five hens comes back, everywhere, unsourced. There is a Philippine statement of it, and it was written for a breeder hen.

Appendix I of AO 12 is a table headed Floor Space and Equipment Requirement in Production, and its nest row reads Nests: - manual 1 nest / 4 to 5 hens, with an automatic alternative at 35 to 40 hens/linear meter. The heading over that table is FEMALE BROILER BREEDERS. The universal ratio has a Philippine home, and the home is a breeder house.

Run it on a bakuran flock of 20 inahin anyway and it gives 4 to 5 boxes. Then come at the same flock from the other side. PNS/BAFS 262:2018 § 6.3.1 sets “Not more than 5 birds per nest hole”, which caps how many birds share a hole, and 20 hens under that cap is four holes, which is the count the layer pillar already prints. Iisang sagot mula sa dalawang magkaibang tanong, at nagkataon lang iyon. Use it as a starting point, kasi wala namang mas malapit.

The size is the one figure here written for a laying hen. PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.5.2 a) asks for “a minimum of 35 cm length x 35 cm width x 35 cm height per hens for individual boxes, or 1m² of nesting substrate per 120 hens for group nesting”. § 6.5.3 d) requires a substrate that “does not consist of wire or plastic-coated wire that can come into contact with the hens”, which rules out the ordinary bakuran build of a chicken-wire tray with a sack thrown over it.

One distinction to keep straight, kasi madaling pagsamahin ang dalawa. AO 12 says shall. PNS 312 says should. The first is a binding order under RA 8485 with penal provisions behind it. The second is a voluntary code whose own § 1 says it “may be used in the succeeding certification scheme”. A bakuran keeper who is not seeking cage-free certification is bound by one and guided by the other.

The coop pillar carries the full furniture table, perch figures and litter area beside these, and the space article takes apart the 12-inch American box that most search results are still repeating.

Sa totoong bakuran, ang mas mahalagang tanong ay kung saan nakadikit ang mga kahon. Isang hilera ng pugad sa dingding na tinatamaan ng hapon ay apat na kahon na iiwasan ng inahin buong tanghali, at doon siya babalik sa sahig.

What goes over the opening, and why is it red?

The curtain is the part of the Philippine standard that reads as though somebody had actually stood in a bakuran. PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 3.5 defines one as “material such as but not limited to, cloth and empty feed sack, used to cover the opening of the nest box and usually in color red”.

An empty feed sack. Usually red. Ang sakong pinaglagyan ng feeds ang mismong materyal na nakalista sa standard, at nasa likod na iyon ng kulungan mo.

§ 6.5.5 gives the fitting, and the coop pillar already prints it beside the rest of the enclosure clauses. Cut the hem long, so it rests on the lip of the opening instead of swinging clear of it.

What the curtain buys is darkness, and a dark box is what persuades a hen to use it. It also closes the only opening the box has, which is § 9.2.4 arriving again, and the answer to that lives in the wall. The cloth darkens the box; the wall keeps it cool.

Substrate is the other half of the build. § 6.4.5 lists what a Philippine cage-free house puts down: “fresh rice hulls (or carbonized rice hulls), wood shavings, saw dust, hay, loose sand, dried leaves, shredded paper, chopped dried straw, and whatever is available in the locality”. That list is written for floor litter, and the same materials are what a nest wants, minus the wire § 6.5.3 d) excludes. Ipa muna, tuyo, at palitan bago mabasa. Ang pinakamurang sako ay ang sako na meron ka na sa likod ng bahay. Kunin mo ang pula kung meron, at gupitin nang tama ang laylayan para dumikit sa bunganga ng kahon.

Kailangan mo ba talaga ng ilaw sa kulungan?

Every Philippine light figure for a laying hen is an intensity rather than an hour target. Twenty lux, forty, sixty.

PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.7.1 carries the two Philippine hour figures in the area, and both are floors: a “minimum period of 8-hour continuous light” and a “minimum period of 6-hour continuous darkness for every 24-hour cycle”. The molting page sets that 8 against the breeder recommendation and measures the gap at six hours.

Read the three documents end to end and a photoperiod target for a hen already in lay is in none of them. AO 12 § 7.4 sends the reader to the management guides, which is to say to the breeders, and it says so in the text. Search DA-BAI’s own Philippine Poultry Layer Industry Roadmap 2022-2040 for the word light and it returns nothing at all, in any casing, and so do nest, perch, roost and bulb.

There is a reason for that shape, and it is a fact about how the document came to exist. PNS 312’s Foreword records that BAFS began the standard “following the proposal of the Animal Kingdom Foundation (AKF)”, with the technical working group chaired by Atty. Heidi Caguioa of AKF and BAI, the Philippine Egg Board Association and the Philippine College of Poultry Practitioners sitting on it. A welfare organisation asked for the document, so the numbers inside it are welfare floors. Production targets were somebody else’s job.

The day length does what it does. Manila’s December day falls 164 minutes short of the 14 hours the breeder guides ask for, and the sibling page derives that and ranks the bulb below water, ration and parasites. Work that order first.

One clause reads like a second Philippine photoperiod until you see where it sits. PNS/BAFS 262:2018 § 6.4.5 asks that “the animals should be allowed a minimum of six (6) hours of daylight per day”, and it sits inside § 6.4, Outdoor range, between the pasture-access age and the pasture rotation clause. It is a rule about letting the birds out of the house. The free range page files it under range access, which is where it belongs.

Three more clauses in § 6.7 each change what a keeper with a bulb should do. § 6.7.2: “Lighting patterns in all houses should be recorded and documented.” § 6.7.3 b): light may “only be reduced temporarily, as a last resort”, and then only where there are “signs of an outbreak of injurious pecking or cannibalism” and other solutions have been tried. § 6.7.4: “Artificial light should be switched off in a stepped or gradual manner to allow the hens to prepare for darkness.”

Then AO 12 § 7.3, which is binding: “A standby power supply shall be available.” Kung wala kang kuryente sa kulungan, tapos na ang usapan tungkol sa bombilya bago pa ito magsimula.

Magkano ang bombilya sa isang buwan?

Meralco’s overall rate for a typical household was ₱14.7833 per kWh in August 2026, down from ₱14.8261 in July, in the company’s own advisory dated 10 August 2026 (Meralco). The advisory quotes Joe R. Zaldarriaga, its VP and head of corporate communications: “For residential customers of Meralco who are consuming 200 kWh, this adjustment translates to a reduction of around P9 in the total electricity bill.”

Two limits ride with that number. It is the Meralco franchise only, which covers Metro Manila and parts of Regions III and IV-A, so a keeper served by an electric cooperative pays something else and no national peso-per-kWh series exists in this archive to stand in for it. And it is an August figure: the pullet page runs the same rate through brooder heat and takes it from the news coverage of the advisory, while the advisory itself is the link above.

Ten watts is a stated assumption and the reader’s own axis, the same way the break-even page labels its sack price. The standard sets lux and the meter counts watts, and the wattage that puts 20 lux over a bakuran floor is a conversion the documents leave to the builder. Swap 10 W for the bulb you own and the arithmetic keeps its shape.

Rough arithmetic rather than a Philippine figure, but it settles the question nobody has a meter for: lux is lumens spread over floor area, and a 10 W LED at roughly 800 lumens puts far more than 20 lux across a 4 m² kulungan. The floor is not the constraint. The hours and the darkness are.

Run 10 W for the 164 minutes December falls short of 14 hours, every night for 30 nights, and it is 0.82 kWh. At ₱14.7833 per kWh that is ₱12.12 for the month. At the June 2026 PSA household egg farmgate of ₱6.74 a piece it is 1.8 eggs. Spread across 20 inahin it is ₱0.61 per hen, and that is before a single fitting or metre of wire. Wala pang isang piso kada inahin ang kuryente sa isang buwan, at iyon ang bahagi ng desisyong ito na madaling bayaran.

So the bill is the smallest number in this whole decision. Ang totoong hadlang ay ang 6 hours of continuous darkness in § 6.7.1 b), which forecloses the round-the-clock programmes sold in marketplace listings, and § 6.7.4’s stepped switch-off, which makes a bare wall switch the wrong fitting whatever the bulb behind it costs to run.

What usually goes wrong

1. The mistake: Putting the pugad in the most enclosed corner of the coop because a hen wants the dark.

   Do this instead: Take the darkness from the curtain and the coolness from the wall. Hang the boxes on the shaded side, off the ground, away from the afternoon sun.

   DA AO 12 s. 2002 § 9.2.4 files nest boxes under TEMPERATURE and requires that they not become heat traps, and PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.5.4 asks for cool and shady placement. A curtained, enclosed box on a hot wall breaks both.

2. The mistake: Building one long communal shelf along the wall and calling it the nest row.

   Do this instead: Divide it into separate holes. Four of them for 20 inahin, each at least 35 cm on a side, with its own curtain.

   PNS/BAFS 262:2018 § 6.3.1 allows not more than 5 birds per nest hole, and a shelf is a single hole however long it is, so any flock over five sits outside that cap the day the shelf goes up. PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.5.2 a) is where the 35 cm comes from.

3. The mistake: Running the coop light around the clock to push the hens harder.

   Do this instead: Give them at least 6 hours of continuous darkness in every 24-hour cycle.

   PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.7.1 b) sets that minimum alongside its 8-hour light minimum. The continuous-lighting programmes sold online come from houses that control their own photoperiod, and they breach the darkness half of the only Philippine clause on the subject.

4. The mistake: Killing the coop light at the wall switch when the household goes to bed.

   Do this instead: Step it down, or fit a dimmer or a second lower-wattage lamp that goes off last.

   PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.7.4 asks that artificial light be switched off in a stepped or gradual manner so the hens can prepare for darkness. Birds caught off the perch in sudden darkness pile and settle badly.

5. The mistake: Lining the nest with chicken wire and laying a sack over the top of it.

   Do this instead: Fill the box with rice hulls, wood shavings, dried leaves or chopped straw, deep enough that the hen cannot scratch through to the base.

   PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.5.3 d) requires that the substrate not consist of wire or plastic-coated wire in contact with the hens, and § 6.4.5 lists the local materials that do the job.

The egg that goes in a separate tray

A hen with nowhere she wants to sit lays where she stands, and PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.15.2 is the one published Philippine sentence about what that egg is worth: “All eggs collected from the floor should be placed in separate trays and labeled for disposal.”

Read the scope before that lands too hard. PNS 312 is voluntary, its § 1 says it “may be used in the succeeding certification scheme”, and its verbs are should throughout. Walang darating na inspektor sa bakuran mo, and the clause makes nothing illegal.

What it settles is the accounting. On the Philippine document that defines what a cage-free egg is, an egg off the floor is worth zero. It goes into its own tray, labelled for disposal. Ang kahon naman ay kahoy, sako at pako, at minsanang gastos lang iyon. So the value of a nest box a hen will actually use is the full gate price of every egg that would otherwise have been laid on the litter, and at ₱6.74 a piece two of those in a month cost more than a 10 W bulb burning every December night of that month.

That is the trade, and it runs the opposite way from how it is usually told. The light is the cheap half. The box is the half the Philippine documents actually describe, and it costs a wooden crate 35 cm on a side, an empty feed sack, and a wall the afternoon sun never reaches.

Questions people actually ask

How many nest boxes do I need for 20 chickens?

Four to five, and the two Philippine figures behind that answer come from opposite directions. DA Administrative Order No. 12 s. 2002, Appendix I, states one manual nest per 4 to 5 hens, which divides to 4 or 5 boxes for a 20-hen flock. That appendix is headed FEMALE BROILER BREEDERS, so it is a breeder figure. PNS/BAFS 262:2018 clause 6.3.1 comes at it as a limit instead, allowing not more than 5 birds per nest hole, which caps a 20-hen flock at four holes. Both documents were written for other birds, and they happen to meet at the same count.

How big should a chicken nest box be in the Philippines? Show the answer

PNS/BAFS 312:2021, the Philippine code of practice for cage-free egg production, sets a minimum of 35 cm length by 35 cm width by 35 cm height per hen for individual boxes, or 1 square metre of nesting substrate per 120 hens for group nesting. The same clause asks that the box be enclosed and draught-free, clause 6.5.3 d) requires a substrate that is not wire or plastic-coated wire in contact with the hens, and clause 6.5.5 asks for a curtain over the opening overlapping at least 1 cm from the floor of the opening. PNS/BAFS 262:2018, the free range standard, states no nest box dimensions at all.

Where should I put the nest box in a chicken coop? Show the answer

On the coolest, most shaded wall available. DA Administrative Order No. 12 s. 2002 clause 9.2.4 requires that nest boxes shall be properly positioned and constructed such that they do not become heat traps, and that clause sits in Section 9 of the order, which is headed TEMPERATURE, under the sub-heading For Growing Adult Chickens. PNS/BAFS 312:2021 clause 6.5.4 says the same thing as guidance: nest boxes should be placed in cool and shady area. The order is binding on backyard keepers because clause 1 scopes it to chickens raised ranging from backyard to large commercial enterprises.

Do laying hens need light in the coop at night? Show the answer

They need darkness at night, and the only Philippine number on it is a minimum. PNS/BAFS 312:2021 clause 6.7.1 requires a minimum period of 8-hour continuous light and a minimum period of 6-hour continuous darkness for every 24-hour cycle, so a lighting programme that runs around the clock breaches the second half of that clause. The same standard sets a floor of 20 lux in the open areas of the house and asks that artificial light be switched off in a stepped or gradual manner, so a bare wall switch is the wrong fitting. No Philippine document publishes an hours-of-light target for a hen already in lay.

How much does it cost to run a light in a chicken coop in the Philippines? Show the answer

About ₱12 a month for a single 10-watt bulb run for under three hours a night. Meralco's overall rate for a typical household was ₱14.7833 per kWh in August 2026, in the company advisory dated 10 August 2026, which works out to ₱12.12 for 10 watts over 164 minutes a night across 30 nights. At the June 2026 PSA household egg farmgate price of ₱6.74 a piece that is 1.8 eggs, or ₱0.61 per hen across a 20-hen flock. The rate applies inside the Meralco franchise, which is Metro Manila and parts of Regions III and IV-A; keepers served by an electric cooperative pay a different rate.