My god its cold buckets in stables are like slush

[mandandpaddy]

Just back from yard and I couldn`t believe it, the buckets in the stables where like slush!!! They are stabled in a barn and i`ve never seen the buckets like this.

Just starting to thaw out now, hubby cooking tea and i`m on here with a glass in hand!!!

[BeTheBest]

Ours also inside an indoor barn were frozen soild this morning!! He now has a tenis bal in his stop this happening again tonite! -7! Brrr

[nicole]

Does a tennis ball in the buckets really work to keep them from freezing??? Does it stop them from getting slushy and freezing around the edges or does it just stop them from freezing solid? Thanks

[BeTheBest]

i dont know I'll tell you in the morning!! Tonight is first time have tried. Used to put two small footballs in troughs outside and that worked, we would just go and take them out before horses went out in the morning.

I am actually sat here worrying that he hasnt eaten the tennis ball....

[Lydia00]

lol the thought of a horse eating a tennis ball brought a smile to my face! errrr actually, he might of tried eating it, he could have mistaken it as an apple! I know my horse probably would!

[Susan]

Out of interest what floor do you have??

[anon]

rubber matting helps stop buckets freezing

[BuckSkinBabe]

Good grief. It gets so cold here that we HAVE to use buckets that plug into an electrical outlet and heat themselves. They work pretty well for I have never had to break ice out of it yet like I had to do in the old days every winter morning with regular buckets.

[tiggs]

Frozen buckets here in Wales as well, and when I checked the horses this morning, I saw that one of the pipes had split. I put apples in the water buckets and they seem to help keep the water from freezing and the horses have a game of ducking apples.

[rosiesmumof4]

thanks Buckskinbabe, I was wondering yesterday how people cope in the USA and other places where it gets really cold - it was *only* -6oC here and my outside water had a 10cm thick layer of ice, and the buckets inside the stables were all slushy and semifrozen.

[BeTheBest]

You will be pleased to know that the little monster didnt eat his tennis ball!!
Also sometime the snow and ice was replaced by horrible rain and so my experiment did not work as wasnt frozen anyway by time i went up this morning!

[BuckSkinBabe]

rosiesmumof4 said:

thanks Buckskinbabe, I was wondering yesterday how people cope in the USA and other places where it gets really cold - it was *only* -6oC here and my outside water had a 10cm thick layer of ice, and the buckets inside the stables were all slushy and semifrozen.

Glad I could answer that. Oh yeah that would be nothing here. And forget semifrozen. Before I got my heated bucket, I would take a standard rubber bucket out into the yard in the morning and bang it on the ground and the all the water would slide out as one big ice cube, frozen solid. The bucket would almost be full to the brim too because for some reason our old horses didn't want to drink much during the night.