Frozen Solid

Alan Holtham seeks assistance in his annual battle with the frozen drinkers in his chicken pens, but are electric heaters a viable answer?

- Alan Holtham

As we continue in winter’s icy grip, the issue of keeping a supply of fresh drinking water available for your birds becomes ever more challenging.

So, with lots of pens to deal with, I thought it would be worth investigating if drinker heaters are actually effective, and whether or not they could relieve me of the twice-daily chore of defrosting.

Simple solution

If you only have a single pen to deal with, the easiest way to deal with iced-up drinkers is to have two; keep one of them warm inside your house overnight, then simply swap it with the frozen one when needed. This is so much quicker and easier than messing about trying to defrost a frozen lump of ice, when you’re already late for work and the car windscreen needs defrosting as well!

Everyone will argue differently about whether plastic or galvanised drinkers are better during spells of cold weather. Personally, I prefer the galvanised type, but actually use a mixture of both. Although I’ve never had a plastic one split when frozen (the commonly-quoted drawback), I think the galvanised ones are generally more robust. Also, I’ve never found that the water in them freezes any quicker than it does in the plastic alternative.

Incidentally, one thing to avoid is putting the drinker inside the hen house at night, in the hope that the warmth from the birds will keep it from freezing. This is very bad practice, as the moisture that inevitably gets evaporated into the atmosphere inside the house, will be bad news for the birds. What’s more, they don’t need water while they’re roosting.