Water bucket ice-breaking – suggestions?

[Soltera]

When heated elements are not an option, I’ve mostly used a flat pry-bar (also called nail-pulling) tool. You can keep it in a hammer loop during the feeding round, it’s heavy enough to break through a thick coating of ice without having to take a big swing, and the hooked part lifts/splashes the ice chunks out pretty well.

Does anyone know of a better tool for this winter chore? I’ve lost my old one, and before I get a new one maybe someone has a better idea? It was 22 degrees Fahrenheit this morning, and I had to use a hammer, which is NOT good at extracting floating ice!

[Abejita]

well I always just used a sledge ( small handheld one) and an ungloved hand.yes it was cold but it only took a few seconds at each tub...I will say that if it is going to STAY freezing for the day , you are better off just letting an opening big enough for the horses to get their muzzle into to drink..the ice covering acts an an insulator for the rest of the water

[motorgypsy]

Ice tongs??? The kind used to pick up blocks of ice. They would work really well for extracting the shards after you smash the ice. They might have enough heft to smash the ice also.

There are several different size and weight nail pullers. I have four different ones. Lowes has a good choice. What size water bucket/tub? I've used a rock and heavy weight waterproof gloves on our 100 gallon tub but a hammer or nail puller would certainly be easier to handle.

[Soltera]

Hmmm...I get the broken ice out of the bucket/tub to keep it from re-freezing back at it's former depth, the depth the horses can't break through. When there is a cleared area, they can break through the thin ice there and drink. Never thought about it's being an insulator! Wonder if I could try it both ways and see which way freezes soonest?

But an ungloved hand? Yikes. I wear neoprene gloves (Walmart, and yes, probably made in China), and can reach my hand in for the ice repeatedly from barn to barn or paddock to paddock and my hand stays toasty though soaking wet. The downside is that if you touch cold metal when the glove is wet, some glove will stay on the metal, and eventually you wear holes in the golves. Try neoprene gloves Abejita! :) And I'll try leaving the ice in a few!

[Soltera]

Several sizes of buckets and tubs, and varying degrees of degrees! :) But tongs sound like a great plan, if they are heavy enough to smash through. Maybe the kind they sell for fireplaces!

Great idea, MGs!

[Jane Hurl]

What you do is build yourself a big enough waterer that everybody can drink from it. Make it from steel. In the middle, build a coal burning heater* that you can load from the top and empty at the bottom. Then you put a tall enough smokestack (ours was a piece of downspout) that the smoke isn't in your horses' eyes, et voila! Works perfectly. You put a bucket of coal in the top and close the lid. Every morning (and evening if you didn't build a great chute) you go and poke the coal to make sure it's still flowing. No more smashing ice. No more horses drinking freezing cold water.

*The coal burning heater needs a hopper on the top that has a chute that lets the coal gravity-flow slowly onto the burning tray. The burning tray needs to be of mesh (or closely spaced bars) so the ashes can fall through and be scooped out of the bottom.

Added bonus: the coal ash usually has "clinkers" in it and makes PERFECT "sand" for slippery ground areas.

[moonrize]

The best solution I have is to move all your buckets and horses to FLORIDA :biggrin: We rarely have this problem, although I usually have to bust through some ice at least once a year :mecry:

[Jane Hurl]

*laughing at Sally* ... *weighing on one hand* frozen water in the winter ... *weighing on the other hand* sssssssnakes, 'n' creepy crawlies 'n' hurricanes. Hmmmm.

Nope. I'll stick with the frozen water, thanks! *grin*

[Soltera]

Let me give you two words, moonrize: alligators and crocodiles. Horses are very dear to me, and I’d take a bullet for them any day, but my dogs are my children. I’ll not live where they can be attacked by such. Irrational? Yep. We have dog eat’n critters up here, too, but they are not dinosaurs! Besides, winter is wonderful – I love the cold!

[Soltera]

Jane, you really need to patent that coal burning water tub! You also need to post a picture! I keep seeing ashes in the water....

[Minouri]

I second the need for pictures of this coal burning tub!

[Jane Hurl]

ACK! I don't HAVE pictures! And our contraption is still at the other ranch, which I don't get to all that often ... so ...

Imagine a trough that is, say, 10 feet long and 3 feet deep. (It has to be steel so it can be welded.) In the centre, you weld in plates crosswise so they divide the tank into three (shorter) sections, only the sections are not equal in size. The centre section is only about a foot wide -- the other two sections are each 4.5 feet long. You with me so far?

Okay ... now you put a little door in the front (or back) of the middle section but down at the bottom of the tank. (Door should hinge on the top.) Now, looking down into that one foot wide section, you are going to weld in a raised "floor" either of bars that are close enough together to hold coal, or heavy wire mesh (the kind they use on catwalks would work perfectly). This raised floor is, say, 8" above the ground. (It is where the coal will sit to burn. That little door [mentioned above] needs to be below this raised floor.)

Now ... about 4" above the grate you are going to put a solid piece of steel in that is tacked on at about a 45 degree angle. This is your chute. It goes from one side to the other but is open at the bottom and the top -- like a slide. Then, above THAT you do another 45 degree chute, but tacked in at 180 degrees from the first chute you put in. This is your second-slide-hopper (so, with any luck, your tank is at least 2.5 feet tall, preferably taller).

Now you have two "slides" inside the centre section, right? Okay, next you put a hinged lid on that whole centre section. (This is so you can control the temperature of your burn. Too hot and the horses don't like it ... and it evaporates in no time.)

Now, the only thing left is the smoke stack. This you would have done before you put the wall in, but I'm describing it here for clarity's sake. Otherwise, I think I would have lost you at the get-go. You need a smoke stack so your fire (that will be 8-ish inches from the bottom of the water tank) can breathe. You make a hole in one side of the coal box . It must be down where the fire burns so the fire can breathe. To that hole, you weld a 90 degree angle piece of pipe that is long enough that the end of it will be ABOVE the water line when the tank is full. We chose a piece of pipe the right size to have a piece of downspout fit over it.

Finished!

Clear as mud? *grin* If this description didn't do it, just say so and I'll try again.

But I have to say, automatic heated waterers (like we have at the new place) are the cat's rear end! *grin*

Editing to add: This gives you TWO heated watering troughs ... a 4.5 foot trough on either side of the fire, so you could put one end in one pen and the other end in another.

[Red Ryder]

Use a small spaghetti strainer for removing the broken ice. Break it with what ever works small hatched works for me.

[motorgypsy]

I knew someone from the cold hinterlands would have a suggestion!! Down here we just pile fresh manure around the tub daily and the heat is enough to keep the water fairly liquid.

I wonder if you could just float some plastic covered foam insulation on your water tank leaving a hole in the center for them to drink through?? I'm thinking if you put that sticky plastic shelf paper over it the horses wouldn't sample it. Ours don't particularly like plastic stuff. You could probably use urethane coated plywood (marine urethane and marine plywood) floated also but it would be harder to remove to clean the tub. Maybe cut in two pieces it would be OK. HMMM.

Ice becomes the same temperature as the air very quickly. The process of becoming ice is a heat loss process. Interesting question. How easily does ice transfer the surface air temp on through to the water? Is it a good conductor or an insulator?

By the way - for those of you who haven't lived in FL - we don't have gators just wandering around. If you live on a lake or big pond you would probably want to keep a check but gators just aren't that common. I'd be more worried about Fido freezing to death in the great white north! Or getting hit by snow plow! Here in FL escaping from the yard and getting hit by a car would be number 1 cause of death probably for a pooch. Of course parvo is up there too.

[Jane Hurl]

*giggling at MG* Insulation to keep the water from freezing? Up here, before winter is done, left to its own devices, ice becomes quite literally FEET thick. Nooooo, you're not insulating it to keep it from freezing. You must have some sort of heat source.

Now, lots of folks DO insulate ... but just so they don't have to spend as much on the heat bill. Our steel watering trough with the built in coal heater isn't insulated. Doesn't need to be with the constant source of heat. (Keeping it going constantly is the ONLY way to fly. Otherwise you freeze your fingers trying to get the stupid coal lit again. Besides, because of the chutes you built, it has a constant gravity feed going on.)

[PattiB]

I lived in north Florida and I saw several gators in small water holes. Big enough to grab one of my dogs, who love to cool off in the water. Nope, I'm with the others, I'll take a little cold over heat, humidity, hurricanes and constant bugs! Visiting to steward shows in Florida is long enough for me.

[Jane Hurl]

But we still love you, MG's.

[Terry Wallace]

google stock tank heating.... there are lots of different coal & wood & propane burner designs for stock tanks. For me...I'll stick with extension cord & electric thermostatically controlled heaters... :v:

In Colorado... I have lived where it was ten below zero everyday for a week (sun shining brightly....) and twenty below at night. No way I would want to go "start" a coal or wood burner! Propane...maybe!!

[Jane Hurl]

But that's the beauty of our coal-fired thing, Terry. You don't HAVE to START it every day. The hopper is big enough that it doesn't run out of coal, and as long as it doesn't run out of coal, it keeps on burning. You just top the hopper off each day, or once a week, depending on the size of the hopper, and scrape the ash and clinkers out of the bottom each morning.

I used electricity only as a back up because of the expense ... and then could only did so close to the barn. If you're dealing with a place where electricity can't get, this is a fine solution.

[cristy]

Try floating an empty milk jug in your tank. (or for buckets, just something that will float on top of the water) If you can tie it to something heavy like big rock and put rock in the bottom of tank so the horses don't take it out it will help keep the tank from freezing over. (up here people put empty milk jugs in theor pools when covering them for the winter to keep them from freezing over.)

Won't keep it from freezing entirely when it is frigid but helps when the temp is marginal. (I know not really an answer to the topic but I thought I would share anyways, lol)

[motorgypsy]

You see Jane it's not freezing here during the day. Only at night. So if we provide insulation we may be able to keep the water from freezing during the night. Our average January daytime temp is in the 50's. NC might be in the 40's. In the 20's at night. We may have three or four days of not going above freezing but it's not common. So the ice melts during the day usually but it will freeze at night and not thaw until noon and the horses don't like going 12 hours without water so we have to break it and dump the ice chunks on the ground first thing in the morning. This is why we need a system to do this without freezing our little hands.

But there was a time long long ago when the dog's water froze in the house and the water froze in the toilet and the bottom fell out of the toilet so we had to glue it back together since we couldn't afford a new toilet. (That W/C for finogirl) So we used a glob of green epoxy putty attached to a paper clip and a string that we tied to a board that we place across the top of the toilet to hold it in place while the epoxy hardened. When it hardened we cut the string and cut off the paper clip. But the large green glob of epoxy remained showing in the bottom of the toilet. We had many a guest come out of the bathroom looking rather ill until we explained about the epoxy in the bottom of the toilet. It provided several years of entertainment until a neighbor got a new toilet and donated his perfectly healthy old toilet to a good cause - us!!! It was -6 degrees F for several nights during that time which was a record and probably still is!

It's so much warmer now we haven't had a good snow in four years. We used to get at least three per year.

[lspaso]

you all have such interesting gadgets for this all we do here is stick a tennis ball in the water buckets so there is at least a small hole that doesnt freeze, I break the ice either with a brick or have been known to stamp on it - being sure to hold on very tight to something so I dont fall in. Hammers work well, I scoop the ice out with my hands usually. I then have to boil the kettle and our hot water over all the pipes - obviously making sure Ive filled it up the night before otherwise there wont be any water to boil. We get insulated pipes but Ive never seen anything for actual water buckets? I do also sometimes pour hot water over the top of the ice too just to melt it a little and warm the water up a bit.

[Jane Hurl]

lspaso ... you don't indicate where you're from, but from your description of dealing with frozen water, I'm betting big money you're NOT from the northerly parts of the US, or from most parts of Canada. *grin*

A tennis ball? It would just get frozen into the middle of the 6" or so of ice that can form on the watering troughs over night up here during a deep freeze!

(Gawd, I love my new electric heated, automatic waterers. I don't care how much power they use over the winter. The pain and aggravation, not to mention frozen fingers, they save me is worth every penny!)

[lspaso]

oh sorry Im an english bird! No such thing as heated water troughs or anything resembling them - ok so it doesnt get that cold here but cold enough for me. And there was me thinking it was hot everywhere in the US;)
Im more worried about the fish I have living in the water bucket freezing, although they have lasted this long.

[lisa l aka marci]

You have any pictures of this contraption?

[Minouri]

Just an interesting fact....http://library.thinkquest.org/C008537/cool/freeze/freeze.html

[Jane Hurl]

Lisa, next time I go to the other ranch, I'll try to remember to take my camera. "The contraption" ain't pretty! It has never been painted, so its colour is pretty much "rust", but it works like a hot-damn.

The one we're using only has the heater in the one end because it was an auction find and wasn't that big of a watering trough in the first place ... but if I were to build one again, I'd find a bigger tank before I began, so that I could put the heater in the middle and heat two tanks for the price of one. (Come to think of it, if you had a good welder on staff, you could make it to heat three or even four tanks!)

[Terry Wallace]

But that's the beauty of our coal-fired thing, Terry. You don't HAVE to START it every day

Yes Jane darlin"...I know. But coal is a very dirty fuel to be adding to the atmosphere... propane I don't mind....its a clean burn. Thats just me...ya havfta understand that I have spent my life dealing with emission laws!
Coal is something I would not want around.

[Soltera]

Hey ya'll - just got back from the Pinto show, and will later post a thread thereupon.

This here thread sure has reaped a fine harvest this weekend! Minouri, the article (from the url you hslpfully posted) is pretty amazing. I'll have to read it a bunch more times before quite understanding it, but the gist seems to be that Mom was right all along. We've always made gentle fun of her for wanting her tea water cold to start with - now it looks like ther may be empirically porveable, chemically based differences between waters' starting temps and the cooling/heating thereof! And here I thought that just because I can READ Discover Magazine and Popular Science, that I was actually UNDERSTANDING them. Humph. Humility tasts pretty good with coffee!

Well, here I was typing the above, and asked my Dad about the article (using his computer today). He said that was an urban legend (not his words! ;)). So he's going to read it and get back with me (his scientific bona fides are pretty good).

Jane, your second description is excellent, but it makes me want to see the thing even more now! I just can't believe you got up the gumption to manufacture such a thing. You da gumption lady!

Ispaso and cristy - Interesting idea - I guess you mean to use jugs to close off the whole top from the air, but in a way that the equines can push aside the plastic bottle and still drink? I've seen those used for cattle, and it's worth a try. Thanks! However, I'm afraid the things would just freeze right into the ice. We'll see.

Red - the strainer is a good idea, very good. Why didn't I ever think of that. Duh-oh (slaps forehead).

MGs -Amigo won't go within 5 feet of manure (except when making it - :D): very very clean and fastidius, making stall and paddock cleanup a breeze, but I'm afraid he'd thirst to death. He's funny that way. And I really thought gators were as common as possums are arougd here...my mistake - but you know Murphy's Law - if there were only one gator in all the land, it would find my yard the first time I let my babies out to play. I'm the only real baby! (flaps arms like a chicken - Bok! bok! bok!!) Too bad you don't still have the green glob loo - that's worth a photo, too!

And finally Ispaso - you have fish in your water buckets? Why? How does that work? What kind of fish? Do you feed them, or do they just clean for you? I have goldfish in an outdoor pond who live right through the winter with no die off, but I should not have them there, because if they ever got into the streams we'd be in real trouble! But I wonder if I could keep tilapia alive with a heated water bucket/stock tub? I've always wanted to grow them. But what's the benefit?

[motorgypsy]

The dissolved gases in cold water is legitimate and does seem to increase the length of time the water takes to freeze. Now the question is - IF you heat the water, then cool it without agitating it - will it still take longer to freeze????

Seems that I had a student actually do an experiment on this problem of hot and cold water freezing and the hot did freeze faster but they didn't try the experiment I just mentioned. Sounds like one we'll have to try!!

[Jane Hurl]

MGs ... if you almost always hit the 40's or 50's during the day, why are you worrying about getting the ice out? Why not just whack it and leave it to melt?

[motorgypsy]

Exactly Jane! That's what Soltera was talking about - getting something to break the ice and flip it out of the tub because lots of our guys don't like ice cold water and since she lost her nail puller which she's been using she switched to a hammer. A hammer doesn't do as well at flipping the ice chunks out and on top of that we're now in a bad drought and need to save water so I guess we should flip the ice chunks into a separate tub and let them melt so we don't waste them. The water situation is becoming critical and no rain in sight for north GA, upstate SC and probably western NC. It's really bad.

[Minouri]

lspaso,

I'm trying to figure out what you pour water over...open pipes? We have a warming element wrapped around our exposed pipes in the barn and it works like a charm.

[echo]

Hi Soltera,
We use this really cool crow-bar claw tool....very handy!
http://images.lowes.com/product/converted/076174/076174550993md.jpg
It's called a Stanley Fatmax 4 in 1 utility bar. The claw end is great for grabbing and tossing the ice without having to touch it. Lowes item 65663.

[motorgypsy]

Lori that is a really cool tool!!! Thanks for sharing!