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We had some nasty weather recently and keeping our livestock water tanks from icing over became a time-consuming but important daily task. Here are some things we learned along the way that may prove useful to you in the future.
Something we have always done is when we break ice in a water trough, we don't break up the whole surface. Instead, we break a single hole in the ice that allows our animals to drink but keeps the rest of the ice in place to act as an insulator and wind-block to prevent the water below from freezing. The animals will drink from the hole frequently enough to keep the water hole open unless temperatures become extremely cold.
Ways to prevent water troughs from freezing:
1) Use black troughs. The first rule of passive solar design is to paint something black and put it in the sun. Using black troughs (fiberglass or rubber) can mean the difference between a solid block of ice and a trough that has just a few inches of ice over the top.
2) Keep them full. The more water you have in the tank, the longer it will take to freeze.
3) Fill them with warm water. We have a faucet hose adapter that allows us to run hot water from a sink in our house out a window and straight into the troughs. We also used a 15' hose with a shut-off valve at the end to make it really easy to run water out of a window. This is not an option for everyone but with the proximity of the troughs to our home, this works for us. We were able to get the hot water to travel through 200 feet of hose to the troughs without freezing on its way there (in -20F temperatures), and the hot water in the troughs bought us more than 12 hours of frost-free water since it took so much longer to freeze.
4) Keep your hoses inside. One of our trouble spots during cold snaps is that the hoses will freeze, even if we empty the water out after using them. We coiled our hoses up after walking the water out and stored them in our mudroom. Next year, we may invest in some exanding hoses to make it easier to bring hoses in since they won't take up the entire floor in our mudroom.
5) This one is a little more unconventional, but stick with me on this one. We have access to loads and loads of manure mixed with hay from feeding round bales to our horses and cows all winter. Decomposing manure (high nitrogen) mixed with decomposing hay (high carbon) generates quite a bit of hay during the composting process. Cattle manure produces more heat, but it does have a high "ick" factor compared to horse manure. We took composting manure and piled it up around our troughs. As weird as it may sound, this simple trick kept our smaller cattle trough (which is in complete shade) from freezing during some really extreme temperatures. We did this partway through our cold snap and even though temperatures were colder after we piled the manure around the trough, it bought us extra time before the trough froze. The nice thing about this one is that anyone with livestock has access to composting materials and it is something you can do in a pinch. I do recommend keeping the manure low enough on the trough so there is not a risk that it contaminates the water with fecal matter.
6) Electric trough heaters. This is one we are not able to implement because we don't have power near our water troughs. But we have many friends who use an electric trough heater, or even heated water troughs to combat the cold in the winter. If you have power near your troughs, you can give this a try or combine it with other methods.
So there you have it, some tips from us on being ready for cold weather and what may be your biggest challenge.
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