How will you feel when you are entirely trapped in a room without any scope of natural air? Suffocated, right? That’s how your horses feel when their arena is not well-ventilated. Many horse owners closed their metal barns to keep them safe from the extreme summer heat and unbearable winter cold. While keeping them safe, the pathogens that arise within that steel horse barn are harming your horses more than the outside heat and cold. Overexposure to dust and harmful particles in the air makes breathing difficult for them. Let’s closely understand why your horse needs a well-ventilated equestrian building and how you ensure to build the best one to improve their overall performance and health at large.
Why ventilation is required in your metal horse barns?
Breaking the term ventilation simply means escaping from the trapped air and entering natural air in the steel horse barn. With regular exposure to the trapped air, the horses find it difficult to breathe, resulting in bad health and performance. Read the following points carefully to understand what can happen if you don’t ventilate your horse arena regularly.
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Respiratory Problems: The bottom air of your metal horse barns has the highest components of ammonia, dust, and harmful pathogens that your stable horses directly inhale. Exposure to these particles results in respiratory diseases that will make it hard for your horses to breathe properly and can further damage their lungs.
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Heaves: These harmful components bring allergic responses in your horses that further limit their performance; the disease is called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The repercussions of such diseases are huge if proper prevention is not taken.
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Inflammation in Lungs: Dust, mold spores, and ammonia caused by urine and wet bedding can result in lung inflammation that can extend to viruses and bacterial infections. Respiratory issues have a direct and extensive impact on your horse if you don’t give due consideration to the problem.
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Allergic Spread: Due to trapped contaminated air in the metal horse barns, they have higher chances of causing allergies that can potentially spread in the whole arena. These allergic responses have a massive impact on the overall health and performance of your horses, and to prevent these kinds of diseases, a well-ventilated steel horse barn is essential.
How do you build a well-ventilated metal horse barn?
By now, you have an idea of how much damage the lack of proper ventilation can do. But here’s the deal: building a properly ventilated metal barn or renovating your old barn to build an appropriate ventilation system can save your horses from future health hazards. Here are a few tips and tricks you can implement to build a well-ventilated arena for your horses.
Vertical Ventilation System:
You can install a robust system for upward ventilation so that all the moisture and dust move upward and get out of the metal barn. One such system is a power exhaust fan at the roof of the building that extracts all the pathogens out of the steel horse barn. Installing a horizontal system will further damage the arena as the dust and other particles move from stall to stall, getting inhaled by horses and then getting out of the barn.
Changing Structural Design:
Changing the orientation of the building is also another potent trick to get ventilation for your horses. For that, you need to have a professional engineer by your side who will guide you through the way about wind direction and what kind of placement should your metal barn have. There should be a proper inward and outward ventilation system for your horses that might not be present in your current barn; hence, getting an engineer’s help will get your ventilation problem sorted.
Adding Extra Doors and Windows:
Trapping your horses in their arena with few windows and doors is trouble-seeking. They need natural air to remove dust and pathogen particles; you need as many windows as possible and inevitable doors at the bottom that extract the dust particles. Reaching out for guidance in this case will also be of great use.
Taking Professional Engineer’s Advice:
The manufacturers who have prepared the metal horse barns may not know everything about the technicalities of the arena, but a professional engineer has a degree to prove his expertise. Hence, trusting an engineer to build the right ventilation system for your horses is imperative. They will frame a well-thought-out plan that will suit your particular requirements.
Adding Natural Ventilation:
This trick highlights the importance of natural air for your horses. Even though you have established a well-thought-out ventilation system and guaranteed insulation, not giving your horses the natural air is far more damaging than other things. You need to have a system that ensures regular natural air flow either through windows and doors in the steel horse barn or by taking them to carports if required.
Conclusion:
Proper ventilation in your metal horse barns is crucial for the excellent health of your horses. It’s their basic need that ought to be fulfilled to ensure better performance and good health. A professional engineer should plan your ventilation system well to ensure proper entrance of natural air and exclusion of pathogens through the system. Sometimes, there are specific requirements as per the area for ventilation; you need to do thorough research about the orientation of the building and proceed further. Again, to protect and safeguard your horse, you ought to have a proper ventilation system.