Frozen water
- Thread starter Anni D
- Start date
Rathervthan breaking ice, I fill a spare drinker with liquid water overnight and keep it in the kitchen, ready for my 7.00a.m. trip down the garden. If you start with water that's not too cold, probably the outside temperature will warm up a few degrees by mid-morning, so its less likely to freeze during the day. Also, breaking ice on drinkers may damage them - plastic ones become brittle in the cold and may shatter, and metal ones can be bent out of shape. It was -6.5 here a couple of nights ago, and when the temperature goes as low as that overnight, I don't think glycerine would make any difference unless you used so much that it would affect the water quality for the birds.
If you have an electricity supply down at your run, you can buy heat pads designed to go under drinkers, which give out enough gentle warmth to keep the contents liquid. Maybe there are solar or battery options of the same thing? However, I find the water needs changing daily anyway, and as our outside tap and the storage butt are all frozen up ATM, I have to bring water down to them from the kitchen, so it might as well be first thing!.
If you have an electricity supply down at your run, you can buy heat pads designed to go under drinkers, which give out enough gentle warmth to keep the contents liquid. Maybe there are solar or battery options of the same thing? However, I find the water needs changing daily anyway, and as our outside tap and the storage butt are all frozen up ATM, I have to bring water down to them from the kitchen, so it might as well be first thing!.
rick
Active member
It hasn’t got as cold as -6 here but I have had frozen water in the previous days drinker I leave out of the run so I can refill it before going in in the morning. If you have power in there then you can do various things: Heated pads, as Marigold said, I've used a beer heater belt before but the drinker has to be at least 5 litres volume and metal or both the belt and the water get too warm - that's much more than mine need at this time of year and if your adding ACV or probiotics occasionally then there’s a lot of waste. I currently have a 50W black heat lamp on a thermostat pointing at the drinker and that stops it freezing.
Before I had power out there (any able heater is going to require more wattage than a solar panel can cope with unless its pretty large) I put a cheap stainless steel 0.5L thermos flask in a small trough and that slowly leaked heat into the water overnight. Well, is stone cold in a couple of hours but that can make some difference overnight. Better might be a hot thermos in a tin of polystyrene packing (or wool?) and the drinker on top - I haven’t tried that.
Before I had power out there (any able heater is going to require more wattage than a solar panel can cope with unless its pretty large) I put a cheap stainless steel 0.5L thermos flask in a small trough and that slowly leaked heat into the water overnight. Well, is stone cold in a couple of hours but that can make some difference overnight. Better might be a hot thermos in a tin of polystyrene packing (or wool?) and the drinker on top - I haven’t tried that.
