Posts Tagged ‘Ritchie waterer’
Coping Well
When it gets extremely cold with dangerously low wind chill temperatures, schools cancel classes and communities postpone events, but nobody cancels walking the dog or feeding the horses. Eighteen below zero Fahrenheit doesn’t keep us from donning our “space suits” to trudge out into the harsh conditions and carrying out our duties the same as every other day.
Asher needs to get out there to freshly mark his territory, and the horses need us to make sure they can get a drink of water and feed them grain and hay. Finding the water isn’t frozen in the morning is a huge plus in having things go smoothly for the early feeding. All four horses appear to be coping well with the biting cold, which also goes a long way toward allowing us to enjoy life here in the Arctic conditions.
While I was standing idle in the morning sunlight, waiting for the horses to finish their grains, I noticed some pigeons were on the waterer. They weren’t satisfied with simply getting a drink. One of them jumped in the water like it was its personal hot tub.
I have no idea how they avoid getting frozen when they step back out into the -18°F air. I would expect them to become pigeoncicles. They have been leaving a lot of pigeon-poopcicles on the horses’ placemats lately that are almost impossible to scrape off. I would say the pigeons seem to be coping with the cold better than all the rest of us.
We are starting to count the days until we can pull blankets off the horses to free them from that annoyance. As soon as overnight temps quit dropping below zero and daytime temps are hitting the 20sF, we will offer the horses some relief. The blankets are helpful during cold snaps or heavy snowfalls, but the horses would prefer not having them matting down the hair on their backs for days on end.
They have done a good job of coping with the necessary evil this week. I’d think they would appreciate having the blankets fluffed and recentered on their backs, but they tend to act non-cooperatively most of the times we try.
We just need to cope with getting a little push-back and reposition the blankets anyway. Having the blankets hanging off-center may not bug them, but it bugs the OCD tendencies in me when I see it.
That’s an area where my coping skills could use a little work.
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Conflicting Evidence
One of the more frustrating situations in troubleshooting is the intermittent problem. Yesterday morning, we heated water and filled an insulated pitcher before heading to the barn to feed the horses. Since the waterer in the paddock had frozen up again the previous afternoon when the temperature was relatively mild, we were prepared for the worst after an overnight of extreme cold.
That wasn’t the case. Water was flowing just fine when we arrived to check. It doesn’t make sense to me.
If the water line is not freezing when it gets really cold overnight, the heat tape must be doing its job. That leaves me with the question of why the heat tape wouldn’t prevent freezing when the air temperature moderates into the teens (F) in the middle of the day.
At one point when we suspected the heat tape might be failing, I surmised the possibility that when the horses consistently drink from the waterer, there is enough flow through the line and the valve that it helps prevent freezing. If the waterer is untouched for a length of time, the static state of water in the lines could lead to freezing.
It’s hard to know if the horses are neglecting to drink from the waterer at regular intervals.
We have found the pans of the waterer empty when the line freezes up, so we know the horses eventually get around to drinking after the line is frozen and can’t refill.
With luck, the extreme cold snap we are experiencing for a few days now will be the last of the season. The forecast for a week from now indicates some days above freezing. At almost two months past the winter solstice, the increasing angle of sunshine in the middle of the days is noticeable. Even when the temperature stays below freezing, there are obvious signs of snowmelt around the grounds.
I’m looking forward to the return of warm days when we won’t have to worry about the waterer. If it gets warm enough that the freezing water line is no longer a problem, it will also mean I don’t have to bundle up in my space suit to go outside every morning.
Double bonus!
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Never Simple
We hadn’t had a problem with the horse waterer in the paddocks freezing up on us again for enough days in a row that I stopped thinking about it. I still regularly glance toward it to see if there is liquid water in the pans, but I haven’t been lifting the cover to press the float and verify water flows. Temperatures were in the teens yesterday, but there was no direct sunshine.
During the afternoon feeding, I found the pans dry and immediately set about trying to warm the lines with my hands while Cyndie hustled back to the house to heat a kettle of water to pour over the tubing. It has worked simply enough to solve the problem each time it occurred the last times we’ve dealt with this. Of course, since it stopped happening, I didn’t pursue buying a new heat tape for that line. D’oh!
Since we weren’t prepared to be doing this, and our latest snowstorm was just getting underway, afternoon chores were suddenly getting complicated. While I was waiting at the waterer for Cyndie to return, Mia came down from her feed bucket looking to get a drink. It’s an awful feeling to disappoint a horse that just wants a drink of water.
When Cyndie popped out of the barn with the thermos, she was also bringing some water in a scoop she planned to use to clean the waterer. Mia stuck her snout in the scoop and guzzled what she could get out of it. I took the thermos, and Cyndie went in to fill another bucket with water for Mia. It didn’t take long at all for me to get the waterer flowing again.
If the horses keep drinking from it, the line is less likely to freeze at these relatively moderate temperatures simply because of the flowing water that refills it. If there is no flow, freezing occurs. We’ll be bringing hot water with us at the morning feeding.
Then I’ll start clearing snow. Just two days ago, I scraped the nuisance trace of snow off the pavement up by the house.
It’s all buried again now.
One more thing that’s not simple is the trick of prey surviving the threats of predators. We suspect that friendly pigeon we started calling “Plucky” may have fallen victim to a prowling cat or fox. There wasn’t a lot of evidence left, but the wing feathers were a dark color.
The predator got a meal for another day.
Life goes on. Cyndie and I are headed to a somewhat rare gathering of my Hays siblings today for an afternoon of catching up on each others’ stories. It’s my chance to tell them all the things I don’t write in this space.
Later tonight, I hope to take in a little sports spectating in the form of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament game between the USA and Canada. Hockey rivalry much? I have a feeling this one won’t simply be just any old tournament hockey game, given the current state of government affairs.
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Fair Exchange
I have been given a chance for a mini-vacation for a few days this week in an advance payment for holding down the ranch solo next week when Cyndie takes a trip to visit friends. Cyndie arranged for a local contractor at our lake place in Hayward to do some work inside the main house and wanted to have someone here to let him in and be around while he worked in case he needed anything.
Her solution was brilliant, as far as I’m concerned. She offered me the chance to come up alone, and I accepted without hesitation. A solo road trip! Yahoo!
Not that I was excited or anything, but I packed the night before and snuck out the door at 5 a.m. yesterday for the drive to the lake. It felt reminiscent of my time commuting to the day job, except it took another hour and a half longer to get here than it did heading to the old workplace.
There had been just enough snow (you know, “nuisance snow” amounts) that I did a fair amount of shoveling to clean up walkways and stairs to both buildings for Brad, the contractor. He will also be doing some work for us in the little cabin while waiting for the sheetrock mud to dry.
Old seals on the hoses to the washing machine in the laundry room leaked when nobody was aware of it, and the resulting water damage included moldy sheetrock.
I took a picture while he was dismantling some shelving to show the yucky wall. After helping carry the frame and countertops out of the way, I gave Brad some space and listened to construction sounds from a distance.
With all obstructions out of the way, he made short work of ripping out the old and installing the new.
While Brad was doing real work, I enjoyed a leisurely day free of any animal duties and listened to my music library at high volume, set up a jigsaw puzzle, did some reading, took a nap, ate like a king (of course, Cyndie sent me off with oodles of good food!), and watched shows on Netflix that Cyndie won’t tolerate.
The hardest part of my day was learning that after a full day of the waterer in the paddock working fine and the temperatures moderating a bit from the most bitter cold, the line still froze again yesterday afternoon. Aaarrgh! Cyndie was able to melt it again and has the installer coming today, hopefully, to check out whether one of the heat tapes needs to be replaced.
I feel bad that the problem continued into her solo watch. One way to look at it though, maybe the added stress yesterday could help her to appreciate even more her vacation from animal responsibilities next week.
Giving each other separate turns to have an extended break from daily chores is a fair exchange. Right now, I’m soaking up my brief autonomy opportunity at the lake with maximum appreciation.
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Wicked Cold
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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Leak Repair
The person who installed our horse waterer works for the excavating company that delivers rock and gravel for our needs. Yesterday, we accomplished two goals that have lingered all summer through his delivery of river rock to finish our landscape upgrade and then his replacing a cracked valve in the waterer.
We started our landscape project in the spring and it has dragged on for months. It is very satisfying to finally have the rocks delivered which puts the completion of this project entirely in our control.
When the rocks poured out of the tilted truck bed, they created a cloud of dust so thick I couldn’t see the truck anymore. Their supply of river rocks had sat collecting all that dust for more than a month due to the absence of rain that would normally provide a periodic rinse.
Due to the incredibly wet spring and summer months this year, it wasn’t obvious that the waterer in the paddocks was leaking. With the arrival of our current drought, the ground dried up everywhere except the area around the waterer.
I don’t like knowing that the cracked valve that was found yesterday is probably related to a freezing event (maybe the first time the barn lost power) and has been leaking for half a year.
The Ritchie waterer needed to be disconnected and removed, and water pumped from the hole in order to confirm the cracked valve and replace it.
Of course, like so many projects of this type, the fix required a trip to the hardware store for parts, which prolonged the time the waterer was out of service to the horses.
I had closed gates to keep the horses out of the small paddock while the repair was underway, but they had full access to the fields through the large paddock. When they wandered in from grazing and showed interest in getting a drink, I hustled to provide a large bucket under the overhang that I filled from the spigot in the barn.
The repair was taking much longer than I expected. Taking advantage of the waterer being disassembled, I was able to scour moldy nooks and crannies that were otherwise unreachable, making good use of time while our favorite repairman was off buying parts. I looked up from my scrubbing and found all four horses lingering around the bucket like a bunch of people bellied up to a bar. Cute.
With Asher napping patiently in the barn, I’d spent the entire afternoon until horse feeding time on this project. When the valve had been replaced and the waterer reassembled, my feeling of satisfaction doubled for the day.
Even though it’s sad to see how dry the ground is in most places around here, I’m really looking forward to the wet spot in the paddock finally drying up for the first time all summer.
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Bad Thermocouple
We all have good days and bad days. Our day yesterday deserves to be called a good one. I try not to complain too much when I sleep soundly right up to a half-hour past when we usually feed the horses. Delilah let us sleep in. By the time I finished breakfast and made my way through the entire daily newspaper, it was almost 11 o’clock.
There are plenty of days when I would feel discouraged that outdoor projects didn’t get started until the middle of the day but given the luxury of freedom to take as much time as I want playing word games on my phone, finishing my poached eggs, and perusing all the articles in the newspaper is something I relish being able to do.
One key aspect of the day that made it so good was how much was achieved after the morning of leisure. Cyndie and I decided to get after the multiple “widow makers” hung up in our woods. Five of them, to be exact. Three of which were relatively small and easy to deal with. That left a couple that I wasn’t looking forward to and led me to don a helmet, just in case.
I was ultimately successful in all cases but the key reason all was good was a matter of luck that my being in an unsafe position right when the chain came off the bar didn’t lead to any negative consequences. The biggest and most challenging tree came down with a scary amount of cracking that had me jumping back three times, only to need to step in and continue the cut each time. When it finally crashed to the ground it was with a ferocious amount of energy that is really unnerving.
Once everything was on the ground, the clean up has become rather routine for us and we were able to process everything with rewarding efficiency. I was even able to cut three other trees that I’ve wanted to deal with for quite a while but never happen to have a chainsaw with me at the time. Yesterday, I had a saw.
As I was finishing up in the last spot, Cyndie caught up with me and said the guy who installed our horse waterer in the paddocks was coming to figure out why the heater wasn’t keeping the water from freezing like it used to.
This was a problem that plagued us throughout much of last winter and it was looking to be even worse this year based on the few overnight freezes we’ve experienced thus far. We’ve been asking for help for weeks but he hasn’t made it out, despite telling us he would.
Just having him show up was going to make for a good day but having him diagnose a specific problem of the thermocouple failure and his having a replacement with him and installing it without trouble seemed like a bonus.
Yesterday was one of those good days.
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Complicated Water
We have water in the paddocks again, but it took far more than simply opening a valve. Friday morning brought constant drizzle with few, if any, breaks. Only periods where it leaned toward actual rain that succeeded in changing the state of our clothes from merely damp to becoming downright wet.
Our guy, Mike, from the excavation company that originally installed our paddock water fixture showed up prepared to do battle, but the circumstances of the cracked valve and seized fittings forced a suspension of work to visit the hardware store in River Falls for an altered solution.
Multiple times, the buried column beneath the waterer needed to be bailed out to allow Mike to see what he was doing. The complication of our setup involves the freeze/thaw cycles that our having turned off the water for two winters fouled up.
Unlike the spigot inside the barn, where the water shutoff is down below the frost level, the line to the waterer is a different situation. There is insulation wrapped around the line and a length of heat tape along the top section of hardware to because there is water in the line all the time.
When temperatures drop, I turn on the electricity and the fixture doesn’t freeze. When we shut the valve two years ago, I flipped the circuit breaker off and forgot about it. We’ve now learned that in the ensuing winters, the water in the line froze and cracked the shutoff valve.
Turns out, the easiest solution is to just leave it on. We’ve got it running now and ready for the return of horses. If we don’t keep horses over winter (still an unknown at this point) we’ll need to make a decision about what we’ll do with the waterer next fall.
I had no idea it could be so complicated to have an automatic water source in the paddocks. Obviously, the fact we experience severe cold temperatures adds one level of complexity, but the fact our location is so wet seems to be a compounding factor.
Yesterday, Cyndie and I finished cleaning up the barn to a degree I didn’t think possible. It looks fabulous and reminds me of the impression we got when we first walked in to see it nine years ago. The four stalls still look almost new.
The final exercise I want to finish today involves pounding down a few more fence posts and tightening up all the wires before turning on the electricity to see where there might be arcing. With that complete, we will feel entirely prepared to host a visit tomorrow from a representative of This Old Horse who will confirm our facility as suitable.
More important for us, this will allow them to know where they are headed and how to position a trailer for offloading horses and smoothly introducing our new guests to their summer accommodations.
I look forward to the horses discovering where they will be able to get a cool drink of water.
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Sky Colors
We enter our third day of the current weather trend where rain is expected all day but comes in bands that are separated by reasonably agreeable conditions that don’t last long and end without warning. One minute it is actually a rather nice day and then, nope, it’s raining like crazy for a second but now it’s just a spattering drizzle.
During the week when I am occupied with the day-job, I rely heavily on the always interesting images that Cyndie captures while she is out walking Delilah or tending to the chickens. News is that our Rocky the Roo has become pretty frequent with his challenges to see if Momma is still at the top of the pecking order.
Cyndie has needed to conjure up her “bigger-rooster-than-you” posture and gestures to convince Rocky that he doesn’t want to mess with the humans in charge. I sure hope our lessons will translate to include all other humans who come to visit, as well.
I wonder if Rocky let out a hearty morning crow for this sunrise Cyndie captured.
The rain has quickly transformed the color palette of our landscape toward a much greener hue. In addition to the burgeoning buds on branches, the areas of mowed grass are looking almost summer-like.
The real feature of this last shot, though, isn’t the green grass. It’s the fabulous light from above Cyndie captured highlighting that billowing cloud.
I really, really hope we get a few breaks in the rain this morning like the ones in these pictures because my Ritchie® automatic waterer installer told me last night that he would stop by in the morning and that’s the closest I’ve come yet to getting him to commit to an actual day and approximate block of time since I first requested his assistance two or three weeks ago.
When the source of skills and knowledge desired is also a really like-able guy, it is easier to endure the anguish of waiting for him to eventually get around to it, but it sure tests a patient man’s patience. I will be exceedingly happy when (and admittedly, if) he shows up.
Maybe I’ll have time to take pictures of an interesting sky while I’m down there eagerly waiting in a couple of hours.
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Looking Around
Our neighbors appeared to be having a pretty big barbecue last night. It was curious because we couldn’t see or hear any human activity around the vicinity of that rather large bonfire. Thankfully, the gale force springtime breezes of the previous few days had calmed significantly.
Between sessions of pounding down fence posts yesterday, I tinkered around with the Ritchie® waterer in the paddocks to see if the last few days of dry weather had dropped the groundwater level below the valve lever. I haven’t been able to turn the water back on and I suspect the valve is seized in the closed position by corrosion.
The problem with solving this conundrum is that the valve is below and behind so many obstructions that it involves a blind reach that would be best facilitated by having one or two additional joints between my wrist and my elbow. When I finally achieve a grip on the lever, the fact that it doesn’t easily turn leaves me frustratedly defeated.
Yesterday, I took a fresh look with a bright flashlight to see if I could figure out a different way to approach the challenge. What the flashlight revealed was that my previous attempts had sheered the line off just above the valve. At this point, I’m really glad I wasn’t able to open the valve the last time I tried.
Time to have the original installer visit with his tools and we will lift the upper portion off the base and repair the valve and water line when it will be easy to reach.
As Cyndie approached the house last night after closing the coop and barn doors, the dark silhouette of the house was nicely complimented by the fading color in the evening sky.
I was already inside, watching a bit of NCAA Men’s Final Four basketball. How ’bout that Minnesota kid, Jalen Suggs’ overtime buzzer beater 3-point desperation shot for the win last night! Spectacular.
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Relative Something 