BUILD A SOLAR STOCK TANK HEATER TO SAVE MONEY AND BE MORE SELF SUFFICIENT

     Here we go as "Old Man Winter" rears his ugly head again!  A blast of cold air is sweeping across the Nation!!!  Soon on the Homestead we'll be slogging buckets of water out to our chickens, goats, cattle, and other stock.  We'll be dealing with frozen garden hoses, chipping ice out of stock tanks, and running extension cords out to those expensive stock tank heaters.  A standard stock tank heater can suck up as much as 1500 watts, and cost hundreds of Dollars over the course of a Winter!!!  They sure aren't very self sufficient, and putting in enough solar panel capacity to run one would break the bank.  The most efficient way to use solar power is to directly convert it to heat, so it makes sense to heat the water in your stock tank directly from the Sun's rays.  Did you know that on average every square yard of America gets 1,825 kilowatt hours worth of energy from the Sun in a years time? The challenge is to efficiently convert that energy into something we can use.  Here on my little homestead I've started constructing a "Rainwater (Snow) collecting solar heated stock tank" for my milk goats.  They're simple to build, and don't have to break the bank as far as materials go.


HERE'S A LINK TO THE BASIC DESIGN FOR YOU TO BUILD YOUR OWN SOLAR HEATED STOCK TANK!