# winter water



## bill not in oh (Jul 27, 2004)

OK I'm looking for your theories, ideas, or resources.

This year I'd like to set up a water system for my barn so I don't have to haul 5 gallon buckets of water 2-3 times a day to my barn [300 feet from my house] to provide water for the goats and chickens. I have [2] plastic 35 gallon water tanks and [3] plastic 55 gal. drums to work with for water storage. Average temps in Jan - Feb is mid-20s and during this period, the water will freeze in the hoses going out to the barn. There are usually 'warm periods' during this time during which I could top off the containers with the hose as 150 gallons wouldn't actually get through two months.

The problem is to keep the water in the storage container(s) from freezing. NE Ohio is not one of the best places to rely on solar, but then I'm not certain what it would take to keep the water at say 45 degrees during these months. There is electricity at the barn, but I hate to add to an already inflated winter electric bill if I can avoid it. Also, I'm adding outbuildings further and further away from the house to rotate the livestock through different paddocks, so running water and electric lines 1500 feet just isn't in the plan.


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## JAK (Oct 15, 2005)

I would first suggest you just bury a waterline out to the barn. 300' perhaps 4' deep. Lot's of work, but doable if you have the time and equipment. You could bury a powerline at the same time if there was a reason to do so. Until you do that your plan is a good one. I would pack the 3 55 gallon drums close together, like a triangle in the warmest part of the barn. If you need to heat a space anyway, like where there are animals, you could just heat the water and let the water heat the space. Otherwise you could just pack the barrels close together and stack some hay bales around them and fill any free space with straw or clean dirt.

But it sounds like you will eventually need water even further out, or amongst more outbuildings, and you want to avoid 1500' of water lines, not 300'. I can understand that. You also say you will be rotating the stock, so you won't need the water and electricity in all the buildings at once. Perhaps then what you need is to be able to move the 3 drums from one place to another, not neccessarily full. If you got 4 more drums you could pack 7 around in a circle with one in the middle and it would hold more heat, and hold it longer. Also, if the water in the outer drums froze during a real cold snap, you could take the middle drum and fill it up with hot water at you house and then put it back in the middle and it should thaw the others out if you pack enough straw around them.


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## MELOC (Sep 26, 2005)

i am lucky to have a spring fed gravity system that normally has adequate water. there are two outside faucets that run at a trickle year round. if you had a spring, perhaps that would be possible.


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## Allan Mistler (Jun 1, 2004)

Bill,
Don't know if you have considered burying the multiple 55 Gal containers with about three feet of cover over them, but the temp at that depth should not drop much below 50 degrees. I have a hand dug well in the barn that consists of nothing more than a 16 foot deep hole with a 20 foot length of 10" diameter PVC pipe inserted and backfilled. On the top is a hand pitcher pump. I also have placed another section of 16" diameter PVC about 5 feet long with 3.5 feet below ground in the cattle stall area. This 5 foot section is topped with an 'on-demand' waterer that switches on a 12 volt pump to fill it from the well and then backdrain to a drywell once the cow removes her face from the waterer. I have to do this now since my entire barn is solar powered this year and I too can't afford to run a 500 watt heater all winter.
If you buried the drums, you could connect them together with 2" PVC piping and have a freeze proof pitcher pump extend into a two inch stand pipe Tee'd into the connecting fittings. Or, get creative with a 12 volt pump. Too many options...


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## SolarGary (Sep 8, 2005)

Hi,

Solar heating of the water barrels in a well insulated enclosure container might work well.

If you built an insulated enclosure for your water barrels. lets say 10 barrels would need an about 4 ft high, 3 ft deep, by 20 ft long --this is about 300 sqft of wall+floor+ceiling. If you insulated to R30, this would lose (300sqft)(50F-20F)/R30 = 300 BTU/hr, at this loss rate, the 4100 lbs of water in the 10 barrels would cool down at the rate of 300/4100 = 0.07 degree per hour, or maybe 2F in a 24 hr day. 

If you glazed the south face of the water enclosure it would give you 80 sqft of glazed area to catch sun and warm the water. On a sunny day, this might amount to (1500 BTU/sqft-day)(80 sqft)(0.8 trans) - (80 sqft)(50F-20F)/R1 = about 90000 BTU in a day. 
This would heat the 4100 lbs of water by 94000/4100 = 22F -- so you don't need many sunny days to keep up with the slow loss of heat when you don't have sun. Partly cloudy days would also add some heat.
A key thing here is that the glazed wall that captures heat in the sun MUST be insulated when the sun is not shinning -- otherwise it will have a very large heat loss.

Just to recap. A well insulated enclosure to hold (say) 10 barrels would only let the water cool about 2F per day. The solar gain through the glazed south wall of the enclosure could heat the water up 20F on a sunny day (less on a partly cloudy day). That glazed wall must be insulated when the sun is not on it. Use dark colored barrels, or paint them black to absorbe heat.

You could use the corrugated polycarbonate glazing that Home Depot sells for $1 per sqft for the south glazed wall. The south wall could be insulated with some from of hinged rigid foam insulation -- You could hinge it so that when it s open, it reflects light through the glazing to increase solar collection. Since you probably go up there a couple times a day anyway, you could just open the insulating cover on mornings that look like you might get some sun, and close the cover in the late afternoon. 
This is a little bit like this solar batch water heater on a much larger scale:
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/WaterHeating/MSBatch.pdf
Except, I would make the glazing much closer to vertical to get the low winter sun -- maybe 60 or 70 degrees -- even vertical would work well.

You could play around with the dimensions -- making enclosure more square would decrease the heat loss some, and also decrease the solar gain -- but make it easier to build.

In the summer, you could use it to heat water for your hot tub

Gary
www.BuildItSolar.com








The nice thing about water is that its has lots of thermal mass, so it will take a long to to freeze it in a well insulated containder.


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

I'd sooner depend on the heat of the earth, as others are suggesting.

Burying the water line to the barn is the way to go. Use a frost hydrant at the barn, & you can just turn on the water to the waterers for a few minutes, and no work to it. Seems like a lot to dig, but only have to do it once for 300 feet, & then think of all the work you save. Solar needs a lot of panes, and a lot of insulation, and will cost you too, not much less than doing it right & just burying the water line to the barn.

If you want to get fancy & have bigger stock, you can put in a frost free, energy free waterer as well. I put one of these in here in Minnesota a couple years ago, & _what_ a great thing! Here is is a good winter day if it gets up to 20 degrees for a 2 month period....

http://www.cobett.com/index.html

If you study it out, it's not that hard of a thing to put together yourself. It just uses a heat tube down 5 feet or so (in your climate - I used the 8 foot insulated for mine) to pull the 50 degree ground temp up to the bottom of the bucket of water. You could cheat a lot in your milder temps & have it work.

--->Paul


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## wy_white_wolf (Oct 14, 2004)

Allan Mistler said:


> Bill,
> Don't know if you have considered burying the multiple 55 Gal containers with about three feet of cover over them, but the temp at that depth should not drop much below 50 degrees. I have a hand dug well in the barn that consists of nothing more than a 16 foot deep hole with a 20 foot length of 10" diameter PVC pipe inserted and backfilled. On the top is a hand pitcher pump. I also have placed another section of 16" diameter PVC about 5 feet long with 3.5 feet below ground in the cattle stall area. This 5 foot section is topped with an 'on-demand' waterer that switches on a 12 volt pump to fill it from the well and then backdrain to a drywell once the cow removes her face from the waterer. I have to do this now since my entire barn is solar powered this year and I too can't afford to run a 500 watt heater all winter.
> If you buried the drums, you could connect them together with 2" PVC piping and have a freeze proof pitcher pump extend into a two inch stand pipe Tee'd into the connecting fittings. Or, get creative with a 12 volt pump. Too many options...


In the current MEN there is an article where someone in Jordon Montana who did something similar to this, but his is solar powered and motion activated to water when the animals come close to it. His system could have easily been done with just a battery and recharge it once a week or so.


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## poatoday (Jun 25, 2006)

Paul regarding those Cobett livestock waterers, I am in East Central Wisconsin also quite cold, would use for just 3 horses. We pull a garden hose out the basement window about 100 feet to refill (basemend is minimally heated), would this waterer work for that or do you have to have water running into it?


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