When I was growing up I had a passionate dream of owning an animal shop.
- I wanted to have a pet store of my own that was located in a Victorian house on the corner of town.
I thought it would be so awesome to have large, spacious windows where you could look in and see all of the awesome pets that I had for sale. I imagined feeding the fish every morning. I thought about walking the dogs up and down the street to gather more business. I dreamt of interacting with the small animals as giggling children looked on. I never really thought about birds though. It turns out, avian critters are a lot harder to take care of even in a temperature controlled store setting. Since I finally got my pet shop up and running I realized that indoor air temperature control was going to be a big problem for any of my bird friends. If you want to have healthy birds you need to have a draftless space. This means you can’t use traditional heating and cooling devices with an air duct system. Normally, I would have used central heating and cooling implements such as my old school AC unit and forced air furnace. These heating and cooling devices do just fine for the puppies and kittens that you traditionally think of. With birds, you need some kind of radiant heating and cooling situation to keep them comfortable and avoid drafts. Since I started selling some feathered friends at my shop I had to create a whole new bird room complete with radiant heated flooring and geothermal cooling.The heating and cooling devices have been expensive to professionally install… so I had better be able to sell some of these pricey parrots.