Hi I’m Mike, when asked why we do something one way, my father in law Gilbert was famous
for saying “because that’s how we have always done it” He wasn’t big on change
but today we start something that could change how we do things here on the ranch and possibly
save us money.
Its all about freezing stock livestock water, stock tanks, heater and experiments, starting
today on Our Wyoming Life.
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A couple of weeks ago we put out a video, talking all about the woes of frozen water
and what we do to combat it, and from that video came a ton of suggestions.
Things other people are doing to keep their tanks open, or just ideas that might just
work.
The problem is, you never know if you don’t try, and something that might work somewhere
else, might not work here.
So today we designed an experiment to test some of those ideas.
First we must prepare for this exercise, figure out what we want to test, what we can test
and how we are going to do it.
I do my best thinking on the fly, so lets head to town to start getting supplies.
Recently we have gotten a Menards in our town.
All of our mom and pop hardware stores are gone, the last one closing a few years ago
but Menards does offer 11% off the entire store at times, and that’s where we go when
having to make even small purchases.
That 11% adds up.
Here at Menards we are going to start fresh, with new extension cords for the heaters that
we are going to test.
Kilowatt hour monitors, to measure how much power we are using and a timer to regulate
when the heaters run.
I hope to be able to test 5 different methods of keeping our water open and drinkable by
animals at all times.
I am planning on testing a regular stock tank heater, left on all the time, relying on its
internal thermostat to kick on and off and keep the water thawed.
Another that we will put on a timer, testing to see if leaving it on only at night helps,
and eventually varying the times to see if 2 hours on and 2 hours off or something along
those lines might be the ticket.
Jess at Govens Farm and Ranch supply is supplying us with two brand new tank heaters and a tank
bubbler that circulates the water to keep it open as well as 5 brand new water tanks
to test with.
All of this has to be loaded and strapped down for the drive back out to the ranch.
Once back home, its time to set up.
Deciding where to do this test was a bit tricky, but we settled on across the road by the old
farm house.
We will have access to water, a level surface to place the tanks on along with power and
when the test is done, we are close enough to be able to pump the water back into either
the bull, horse or steers water tanks, preserving the water we use for testing.
With all five tanks set up, then its time to start filling tanks.
A storm is on the way, we are expecting between 4 to 8 inches of snow and temperatures down
into the low teens tonight, so if we get all this set up, we should have results by tomorrow.
With a temperature now at around 28 degrees we can head inside the house to start setting
up power while tanks fill and get everything ready to go.
First up, we need to build our heaters.
Two regular floating stock tank heaters will be used today, a shield is put in place over
the heating elements to keep them away from the sides of the plastic tanks and keep them
from melting.
I do have to take them back when we are done after all.
The pond breather is something I have never used however and it will be interesting to
see how it works.
The packaging claims that it uses a 31 times less energy than a standard tank heater and
will protects against ice up to 15 inches.
Honestly I’m not too sure about this thing but its worth a try.
Our Kilowatt hour monitors, have LCD screens so we cant put them outside where they can
freeze but luckily with the house this close we can run power out the window, keeping our
monitoring equipment inside.
Each cord receives a monitor that will keep track of the power usage of each heater or
pump, and one gets the timer that will allow us to regulate when it is running.
For now we are going to set it to run only at nighttime when we have our closest temperatures.
Now someone is going to say, what about solar, and we did look into it.
In order to run a 1500 watt heater we would need 10 square feet of solar panels, and batteries
to hold the power, we would also need heaters to keep those batteries from freezing, adding
another 5 to 10 square feet of panels.
All at at a cost of over 5000 dollars, just for one heater.
At our current power usage rate for a stock tank heater it would take over 16 years to
pay for itself and over that time you would have to replace batteries, possibly forever
keeping you upside down on it.
Solar fans, don’t fret though, solar for us makes more sense in the summer and this
summer we are hoping to put in some solar water wells for the cows, hopefully that makes
up for winter raining on our parade when it comes to solar.
Back outside, we continue to fill tanks, each tank holding almost 500 gallons.
Here is the plan, the first tank is going to hold the tank heater that is on all the
time, with only its internal thermostat to regulate it.
The heater turns off at about 35 degrees and turns back on at 30.
In the second tank goes the heater that is on a timer, right now set only to be on at
night.
The third will hold our bubbler, circulating water around where hopefully the movement
of water will keep it from freezing.
The last two tanks are left with no heater.
Both as a control, however, when this one freezes, we will break the ice, then remove
the broken ice from the tank, allowing the sun to warm it throughout the day.
The last tank we will also break ice, but leave the ice in the tank to see if removing
the ice keeps it from refreezing as fast.
That’s our experiment, the temperature is dropping fast and now we just wait out tonights
cold temperatures and storm.
We will be back in the morning and see what we have to deal with.
The next morning, it seems our storm didn’t hit us as hard as we thought it was going
to.
We still ended up with a couple of inches of snow, lots of drifting and a low temperature
that reached about 15 degrees.
After feeding the cows we can head out to take a look at our stock tanks.
And promptly get stuck in the snow drift outside the shop, this wasn’t planned but after
some digging and some back and forth, we get the gator back in the shop and head to the
pick up to get going.
Arriving at the test grounds we find some interesting results.
The stock tank where the heater was left on is open as expected but the tank where the
heater was on a timer is completely frozen over.
Our bubbler didn’t do anything to keep the water from freezing, although it is still
bubbling away and the two tanks on the end as expected are frozen as well.
Heading into the house we can check out power usage for the night.
The tank on the timer only used .87 Kilowatt hours of power and ran for 12 hours, costing
about 1$.
The bubbler used .75 Kilowatt hours and ran for 16 hours at a cost of about a dollar also.
The heater that was on all the time used a bunch more at 2.8 kilowatt hours at a cost
of about 4 dollars I’m not sure why the heater on the timer
didn’t use more but this is a on going experiment that we are going to be able to tweak and
play with over the next week or so.
More results will be coming as well, including the results of breaking ice and removing it
from the tank and just leaving it in.
We are also saving the ice that we remove to see how much water we are tanking out of
the tank by removing the ice.
Left alone this ice would melt and return into the soil and eventually the water aquifer
but a good point was made that we were still paying to pump the water that the ice is made
of.
Is that enough to offset the cost if the water stays open longer by removing it?
Only time will tell.
This experiment is far from over and I hope to bring you some more results as we go along,
we are tracking everything we learn and we will be playing with the timer of the tanks
to see if there is an optimal setting to save money and keep water open.
I think to succeed, in whatever you do, you cant be afraid to try new things, but you
also have to take the time to find out what works best for you.