Kinda a weird first post to make, haven't even done an intro post yet, but thought I'd show an idea my husband and I worked up and installed today to keep some of the potential water-icing problems I could experience this winter at bay.
[Edit for context: I'm a new rabbit owner/rabbitry, and I've had my rabbits 2 months. So far everyone is happy, healthy and growing like weeds. But this is the first winter for both my rabbits and I, and I'm trying to play with ideas that can handle some of the more extreme winter weather in my climate as a contingency.]
The idea is that there is 5 gallon bucket, with a water heater inserted, serving as a reservoir. The heater is run by a temperature sensor, keeping it, in this case, at 40c. A bilge pump inside circulates the warmed water through a line that runs up through my cage stack, with copper coils inside water dishes in each cage, before returning to the reservoir. (Coils inside the cage, water line outside to avoid chewing issues). The copper coils serve as a heat transfer location, warming the water in the watering dishes, keeping them de-iced.
Temperature controller:
Reservoir:
Heating element/water bowl: (note the fancy salmon can...)
The first test went quite well! (My buck seems to the be smartest of the lot, and had figured out the new water within 5 minutes)
I'll be the first to admit: It's over-engineered. However, we had all of the parts sitting around, and a bored engineer on hand, so hopefully that somewhat explains how ludicrous this thing is. It's also somewhat designed around the conditions in my rabbitry in particular: 3 rabbits/holes, access to power, and a reasonable probability of the kinds of temperatures capable of freezing hell over. I don't really expect this to transfer perfectly, but thought the idea was worth posting in case someone else is looking at building a system and wants to see how this particular approach works. While I suppose it would be possible to scale this up to a larger rabbitry, I can see their being some issues with it. Not the least of which is if you're running 50 feet of warmed water loop, you need a large/fast enough pump to complete the whole circuit before anything can freeze, even in extreme temperatures.
We'd discussed other ideas for winter watering, some low-tech and some more traditional high-tech ones such as running nipples off the warmed water line, or having open cups with inflow and outflow all on the common line. But I shied away from those, mostly because I think keeping water warmed at 20-40c and running it through all the cages seems like an easy way to get contaminated water. At least this way, each rabbit gets it's own water dish and if that gets fouled, it's then on the rabbit in question that they ruined their perfectly good water. The only other issue with the nipple system was that with very low temperatures, it was possible the nipple-end COULD freeze even if the main line is still flowing, locking the rabbits out of their water anyways.
Now, the disadvantage is that my rabbits get only the amount of water that fits in their cage bowl: I don't have anything automatically refilling that. Given the kind of temperatures I'm trying to ensure this system can handle, I think a warmed gravity feed system might get a touch complicated. But an auto refil system isn't a priority at all. The easier way to handle that would just be to make bigger dishes to stick the coils in. (Maybe some of those nice rubber 1 quarts? But they'd have to be imported to me, so that's perhaps a ways out.) I'm out there 2x a day to feed anyhow, topping up the water dishes is easy enough. I just felt really bad about the rabbits getting locked out of their water. And if it ever hit -40C (which is plausible, though we are currently having a very mild winter for the time being.), I would be concerned that they'd be unable to drink anywhere near enough from a bottle before it froze up. (I also wonder if rabbits can freeze their tongues to cold metal like I used to as a kid... that was painful!) I figure this will give them access to at least a minimum amount of water in a day.
Our worst case scenario is we scrap it and I move to switching crocks of some type 2x per day. The only cost to us for the system so far is the electricity to run it, since everything else was lying around from other various DIY builds or home-brewing projects. And my smarty-pants buck seemed very happy about it, at least.
[Edit for context: I'm a new rabbit owner/rabbitry, and I've had my rabbits 2 months. So far everyone is happy, healthy and growing like weeds. But this is the first winter for both my rabbits and I, and I'm trying to play with ideas that can handle some of the more extreme winter weather in my climate as a contingency.]
The idea is that there is 5 gallon bucket, with a water heater inserted, serving as a reservoir. The heater is run by a temperature sensor, keeping it, in this case, at 40c. A bilge pump inside circulates the warmed water through a line that runs up through my cage stack, with copper coils inside water dishes in each cage, before returning to the reservoir. (Coils inside the cage, water line outside to avoid chewing issues). The copper coils serve as a heat transfer location, warming the water in the watering dishes, keeping them de-iced.
Temperature controller:
Reservoir:
Heating element/water bowl: (note the fancy salmon can...)
The first test went quite well! (My buck seems to the be smartest of the lot, and had figured out the new water within 5 minutes)
I'll be the first to admit: It's over-engineered. However, we had all of the parts sitting around, and a bored engineer on hand, so hopefully that somewhat explains how ludicrous this thing is. It's also somewhat designed around the conditions in my rabbitry in particular: 3 rabbits/holes, access to power, and a reasonable probability of the kinds of temperatures capable of freezing hell over. I don't really expect this to transfer perfectly, but thought the idea was worth posting in case someone else is looking at building a system and wants to see how this particular approach works. While I suppose it would be possible to scale this up to a larger rabbitry, I can see their being some issues with it. Not the least of which is if you're running 50 feet of warmed water loop, you need a large/fast enough pump to complete the whole circuit before anything can freeze, even in extreme temperatures.
We'd discussed other ideas for winter watering, some low-tech and some more traditional high-tech ones such as running nipples off the warmed water line, or having open cups with inflow and outflow all on the common line. But I shied away from those, mostly because I think keeping water warmed at 20-40c and running it through all the cages seems like an easy way to get contaminated water. At least this way, each rabbit gets it's own water dish and if that gets fouled, it's then on the rabbit in question that they ruined their perfectly good water. The only other issue with the nipple system was that with very low temperatures, it was possible the nipple-end COULD freeze even if the main line is still flowing, locking the rabbits out of their water anyways.
Now, the disadvantage is that my rabbits get only the amount of water that fits in their cage bowl: I don't have anything automatically refilling that. Given the kind of temperatures I'm trying to ensure this system can handle, I think a warmed gravity feed system might get a touch complicated. But an auto refil system isn't a priority at all. The easier way to handle that would just be to make bigger dishes to stick the coils in. (Maybe some of those nice rubber 1 quarts? But they'd have to be imported to me, so that's perhaps a ways out.) I'm out there 2x a day to feed anyhow, topping up the water dishes is easy enough. I just felt really bad about the rabbits getting locked out of their water. And if it ever hit -40C (which is plausible, though we are currently having a very mild winter for the time being.), I would be concerned that they'd be unable to drink anywhere near enough from a bottle before it froze up. (I also wonder if rabbits can freeze their tongues to cold metal like I used to as a kid... that was painful!) I figure this will give them access to at least a minimum amount of water in a day.
Our worst case scenario is we scrap it and I move to switching crocks of some type 2x per day. The only cost to us for the system so far is the electricity to run it, since everything else was lying around from other various DIY builds or home-brewing projects. And my smarty-pants buck seemed very happy about it, at least.
