When I was growing up I had a superb dream of owning an animal shop… I wanted to have a pet store of my own that was located in a Victorian household on the corner of town.
I thought it would be so fantastic to have large, spacious windows where you could look in and see all of the wonderful pets that I had for sale.
I imagined feeding the fish every day. 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 more challenging to take care of even in a temperature controlled store environment. Since I finally got my pet shop up and running I came to realize that indoor air temperature control was going to be a major concern for any of my bird friends. If you want to have healthy birds you need to have a draftless space for them. This means you can’t use traditional heating and cooling devices with an HVAC duct system. Normally, I would have used central heating and cooling implements such as our old AC device and forced air oil furnace. These heating and cooling devices do great for the puppies and kittens that you traditionally think about. With birds, you need some kind of radiant heating and cooling situation to keep them perfectly comfortable and avoid drafts. Since I started selling a few 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 expensive parrots.