Relative Something

One hard part about surviving a bitterly cold winter night is when the following day and night offer no relief. In fact, the second night proves to be even more harsh. Ouch. It would be great if we could just hunker down inside beside a warm, glowing fireplace during extremes such as -20°F with crazy windchill numbers making it feel much, much colder.

Wisps of deep-freeze ice crystals decorate the driveway.

With outdoor animals that need to be fed and a pet dog that needs to be walked, we don’t have the luxury of staying inside. Adding insult to the brutal conditions, yesterday afternoon I discovered there was no water in our Ritchie waterer in the paddock. Something was frozen. The question was, what to do about it? Of course, Cyndie had the right idea.

She placed a call to the guy who originally installed it and who also repaired the leaking valve last fall. He was at a funeral. She left a message and called the office. The owner answered (which is how she learned our guy was at a funeral), and he tried to offer some suggestions. It was just enough to help me with an idea.

I dug up a heat lamp that was stowed in the vacant chicken coop. Meanwhile, our guy at the funeral checked his messages and called Cyndie back. He provided more specific instructions about where the most common freezing occurs and how to address it. She heated water and came down with an insulated carafe. While the heat lamp was pointed into the inner workings from a side access panel, we chipped away at the frozen cover.

When the cover came loose, Cyndie slowly trickled hot water on the exposed float valve and feeder tube until the carafe was empty. When she returned to the house to get more, I held the heat lamp strategically over the valve. In about one minute, I heard some action. The water was starting to move. The heat lamp was doing the trick, and soon, water filled the metal pans of the double-sided waterer.

Earlier, we had put out electrically heated buckets of water under the overhang to encourage the horses to drink more water during the cold spell. Now, they were showing curiosity about what all the fuss was down at the waterer. I’m hoping they will keep drinking from it because that will move water through the valve, and maybe slow any refreezing likely to re-occur at these wicked cold temperatures.

If it is frozen again this morning, at least we know exactly what we can do to solve it.

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