Since I said in my first post “don’t blame me if it doesn’t work, it was my husband’s idea”, I feel like I should follow up and first off, appropriately credit him for the fact that his idea of using aluminum foil to reflect more heat upward toward the chicken waterer DID work :) Temps got down below zero last night, and my girls still had water first thing this morning!
View inside the coop. That window is secured by hardware cloth and is open during warm weather; we put a double layer of heavy plastic over it for winter.
To recap, for anyone who has power available to their chicken coop but doesn’t want to spend $60+ on a water warmer, here’s the results of our science experiment in making our DIY water warmer work in zero degree weather.
We started out with this tutorial: http://citygirlfarming.com/2013/11/09/diy-chicken-water-heater-less-than-four-minutes-and-four-dollars/ but instead of putting a foil cake pan over the concrete block, I got a second ceramic tile (they were 66 cents on clearance at Lowe’s!). Our waterer was just the wrong size on the bottom to sit securely on the block without tipping, so the tile gave it a better base to sit on.
The waterer normally hangs from that nail anyway, so we built the warmer under it.
But once temps dipped into the teens, the entire waterer froze solid. So my husband had the idea to line the inside of the block with foil. When I took the tile off to install the foil, I also discovered that the light bulb had slipped off the piece of brick holding it upright. So I pulled the bulb up to where it would be right under the tile, stuffed some foil underneath to keep it from sliding down, and repositioned the brick (which is under the foil now in this pic)
The next morning, I was pretty eager to see if it had worked. The first thing I saw was—solid ice in the trough of the waterer :( but upon a closer look, most the water in the reservoir was not frozen! And the tile was actually hot to the touch. So now I just had to compensate for the fact that the trough of the waterer is wider than the opening of the concrete block, and therefore outside the warmest area. I moved the whole apparatus a couple inches to the side....
....and ensured that the opening from the reservoir into the trough was positioned in the “warmest zone.” I wondered if losing some of that heat meant the reservoir itself was more likely to freeze, but hey, there was nothing really to lose ;-)
This morning the verdict was: it worked! About 75-80% of the trough was frozen, but the reservoir was not, and the part of the trough by the reservoir opening was clear! So there you have it, a water warmer that won’t break the bank AND works in ~zero degree weather. (For those of you in even colder weather...I feel the pain. 20 years ago I spent a winter in Ely MN and got to experience months of -40 and below not counting windchill! kind of weather. BRRRRRRR!!!)
Just for fun, here’s my husband’s handiwork in converting one of the outside barn stalls into the coop, mostly repurposing materials already in the barn. I call it a work of redneck art.
And my girls enjoying the nearly snow free garden area, even if it was zero degrees.
Edited Jan 6 to update: It is still consistently working! I go out in the evening with a full pitcher of warm water, remove any ice in the trough and usually 2-3” of ice in the top of the reservoir along with the cold water, and then refill it with the pitcher. With the adjusted placement and starting with warm water, half the trough and most of the reservoir stays ice free all day long.