Winter Chicken Waterers
Before we left to go to South Carolina, Mark
set up a crock
pot in one chicken tractor and the ice and easy in
the other. He also put some backup waterers in each tractor
just in case.
Turns out that the ice and easy won the contest by a long shot.
When we got home, the crock pot had pretty much evaporated dry while
the ice and easy's trough was still halfway full of water. It
looks like the crockpot will only work in sustained cold weather.
(We left during a warm spell and the daytime temperature reached 50 F.)
I'm sure Mark will be playing with his design over the next few weeks,
maybe figuring out some way to make a crockpot turn itself off when the
water temperature rises above freezing. But for now, my advice is
to stick to the ice and easy!
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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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