Heated chicken waterer
We outsourced our final
chicken-related experiment to our readers. Frozen water is one of
the difficulties of raising livestock in the winter, so we solicited
suggestions for turning our do it yourself
chicken waterer kits
into a homemade heated waterer.
The suggestions were
inspiring and diverse. Heating elements ranged from heat lamps,
aquarium heaters, and heat tape to stock tank heaters and gutter
deicers. But we loved the heated waterer shown here the
best. For $26, Lu Ann and Christian Shank created a chicken
waterer that sandwiched heat tape between two buckets --- a very
repeatable and elegant design. You can read their description of
the project here, and we now feature it along
with some other heated waterer options on the instructions file that
comes with our DIY kits. Thanks for solving such a thorny
problem, Lu Ann and Christian!
This post is part of our 2011 Chicken Experiments lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Good, low tech idea to use a black bucket to capture solar radiation! We put our winter waterers inside the coop to keep them warmer, but if it was in the open, that would definitely make sense. (Maybe even in the coop a black bucket might grab more warmth? I'm not sure....)
The heat tape sandwiched between the buckets has a thermoregulator, so it kicks on at a certain temperature (maybe 40 F?)
If there is enough sunlight, build a solar water heater.
You can also build a solar hot air collector to keep the coop warm.