Manitoba Hydro offers several incentives to encourage livestock producers to install more energy efficient equipment in the barn.

Among the programs are incentives to replace heat lamps with heat pads, upgrade lighting, upgrade insulation and install more energy efficient heating.

Manitoba Hydro Agricultural Engineer Ray Boris reports there are a couple of key areas where producers can improve productivity while cutting energy costs.

Ray Boris-Manitoba Hydro

There's two key areas that work in a hog barn.

One is replacing heat lamps with heat pads.

By replacing heat lamps with energy efficient heat pads the savings can be as much as 70 percent.

It works out to about 45 dollars per year per crate in power savings and then another 15 dollars for the heat lamp replacement so a total saving of about 60 dollars per year per crate.

Also it's more environmentally friendly as well by, instead of discarding the heat lamps by using energy efficient heat pads which last up to 15 years.

The other area you're looking at in your barn is the lighting.

What we found over the years experience is that a number if the older barns are typically only about five foot candles or in that area.

To not only improve the lighting so that you can better reproduction within the barn but to do it energy efficiently as well, particularly if you have incandescent lighting to consider making the switch to fluorescent T-8 which would give a payback of about 1.6 years with the financial incentive.

Boris notes extensive research has shown there is no statistical difference in weight gain or in mortality when switching to heat pads and, in addition to the energy savings, the heat pads provide more uniform heat, minimizes drafts and reduces piling.

Further Reading

- To read our article 'Optimising Energy Efficiency in Pig Buildings' click here.