# Solar Option for heated water bucket?



## mzgarden (Mar 16, 2012)

Is anyone using a solar de-icing solution for water? Our goal is to enable our 2 goat boys to have fluid water during the SW Ohio winter. We'd be using a 5 gallon heated bucket. This would be our first foray into solar so we'd need this to be pretty simple.

Thanks,


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## TnAndy (Sep 15, 2005)

Guess I don't get what you are looking for. You have a heated water bucket, I take it....so the water IN the bucket stays liquid ? What's the solar part ?


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## mzgarden (Mar 16, 2012)

sorry. I said it wrong. :ashamed: In the barn we use heated buckets because we have electricity available. In the buck enclosure there is no electricity, so I'm looking for an alternate option to keep their water bucket from freezing. I'm wondering if there's a solar option to keep a water bucket from freezing in their enclosure.


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## Bearfootfarm (Jul 13, 2006)

> I'm wondering if there's a solar option to keep a water bucket from freezing in their enclosure.


There's really no way for solar to work in that scenario unless you can use the Sun to heat a large volume of water in an enclosed, well insulated container that you can then set your bucket into.

It may be less trouble to just run electricity to the site


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## wy_white_wolf (Oct 14, 2004)

www.builditsolar.com has some options on solar heated stock tanks. Something along that line might work if you could open up the south wall for the collector to stick out. 5 gallons doesn't have enough thermal mass for me to see it working. You need volume to have enough heat stored to get through a night or couple days.

WWW


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## mzgarden (Mar 16, 2012)

thanks for the information. We'll look for another option.


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## doc- (Jun 26, 2015)

Our midwest winter cloud cover makes passive solar heating an inefficient option. I just split the sod and bury an extension cord from the barn to a coop and a goat shed 100ft away. Same cord has worked well for 10 yrs now.


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