Horses Living Out - Frozen Water troughs

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winchester

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For those of you with horses living out - what do you do re your water troughs?? I hammered mine yesterday but by the time i turned round it was frozen again! Done the pinch neck test but all the horses seem to be ok? Do they eat the snow or somehtign if they are thirsty??

What does everyone else do?
 
I break the ice and then remove it...as I have three in the field they tend to keep it open between them.
I *think* I've seen adverts for little heaters to keep the troughs ice free, but can't remember any more about it.
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I have just tried the tennis ball test, and whilst the water did still freeze around it, it was far easier to break by pushing the tennis ball down.

It was VERY helpful to my horse aswell, as he is incapable of breaking the ice in the trough normally!
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you need to remove the broken ice from the trough i think, otherwise the horses would need to push the ice down to get at the water and of course it can freeze back up a lot quicker
 
I put TEN tennis balls in my horses large trough and within 30 minutes it had re-frozen, but this time when I removed the sheet of ice, it had 10 tennis balls frozen/suspended in it

PAH!
 
i use a sieve to take the ice out, it takes a lot longer to re-freeze then. pouring boiling water in will delay freezing too. most horses are bright enough to break the ice... trouble is, with plastic containers they can break that too...
 
I don't think mine have even bothered to walk over to their trough! I've been putting water out for them every day - thank god for the field drain that we use, pipes are frozen solid!
 
I have put buckets out with warm water in but they are frozen by lunch-time!
My horse licks the frozen puddles even though there is water out, but then he is a bit weird sometimes!
 
We smash the ice on ours and take it out. However, we are also very lucky as we have a field drain that flows just near the stables and that keeps going all through winter so we can fill up buckets very quickly in case the horses can't get to the trough.
 
I break the ice & remove it (using rubber gloves) but it's so cold it refreezes quite fast. But they must be getting enough water by eating the snow covered grass because they're not interested in drinking when I've cleared the trough.
So I'm not worried.
 
The tennis ball does help, but at minus quite a lot last night was the only morning I couldn't budge the ball and get to the water in the morning. We add a couple of buckets of warm water from the indoor tap every now and then too, one of the 2 definitely eats snow
 
I have been taking barrels of hot water up to mine as the baths froze so bad that i could not break it, the hot water sits on the top and defrosts the ice enough for me to break it and remove it.
 
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