Hot water at the barn? How do you do it?

[trubandloki]

I either carry hot water from the house or I use one of those (very inexpensive) plug in electric kettles that makes boiling water pretty darn fast.

I only use hot water for soaking hooves or making sloppy meals (which I normally do in the house and carry out at meal time) so this set-up works out fine for me. I do not bathe in the winter. I feel if it is too cold for my hands to be soaking wet then it is too cold for me to drench my horse.
My horses have heated water buckets so no need for hot water to add to buckets.

[2DogsFarm]

No hot water source in my backyard barn.

Heated 5gal buckets in the stalls & sinking de-icer in the 50gal trough right outside the barn.

If I need hot water - say for soaking a foot - I carry a thermos from the house.

I also have an old crockpot, kept in the barn, that I use on the rare occasion to make a mash.

I bathe my horses…well, almost never, so certainly not when temps go below 60F.

[bdj]

Just one horse, so I have a little electric teakettle for hot water. It makes enough in one go to make a mash or warm up a small bucket of water. Also have a heated muck tub for the pony’s regular water.

A small water heater would be nice, but the tack room isn’t insulated, and I went for several winters with no electric at all, so having any hot water (that I didn’t have to carry from the house) feels pretty luxurious to me!

[Wild1]

Hot Water Heater

I have done without, carried hot water to the barn, used submersible heaters…now at last I have a hot water heater. I don’t know why I waited to install it, and I wouldn’t do without it in the future. Tankless was too expensive. I purchased a really fancy one from Home Depot very inexpensively as a scratch and dent mark down. Its in a small well insulated feed room with a small toe kick heater set underneath my cabinets as the sole heat source…that I only use when its really cold. I created a wash area just outside so the hose bib goes thru the wall. Do without lunch, eat pasta for dinner for the next month do whatever…you wont regret having hot water at the barn

[Pocket_Pony]

[QUOTE=SugarCubes;8831094]
50 gallon water heater in climate controlled tack room, shares a wall with the wash stall. No issues even when it was subzero for over a week last winter.[/QUOTE]

Same here. Water heater in the tack room; pipes are wrapped and insulated. Pipes go through the wall to wash rack next door (one for hot water, one for cold). There’s a small wall heater that has a thermostat. I put that on at night (only to 50 or so) and lock the cat in there so he’ll be warm. It is warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and to make it feel like a sauna when it is -6 degrees outside! :lol:

My last barn I had a Zojirushi little hot water dispenser and I would use that for making horse buckets at night. But I was in CA and it never got so cold to threaten our pipes. In the wintertime here, I pull out my special hot-water hose (that I keep in the warm tack room and un-do whenever I’m not using it) on a daily basis to fill water buckets with hot water and to make dinner buckets. My tack room has a sink with hot water that is priceless for warming my numb hands halfway through pick-axing frozen poo balls from the ground!:lol:

[Frog_Pond]

No power or water at my backyard barn. I use a Honda generator, an electric kettle, and an immersion bucket heater. Or, I lug hot water from the house in 1 gallon milk jugs, or 5 gallon containers. I use this water – no mater how I get it – to top off water buckets & bring their stock tank temp up as high as I can. Occasionally, I need it for first aid or washing small areas of horse. And I make myself tea, of course!

Kettles are small – make 1.5 liters hot in a few minutes. Bucket immersion heaters are dangerous when ignored/forgotten about, and take awhile to heat 5 gallons . . . but, I’m mucking out at the time, and really, I’m just looking to delay freezing, so I don’t care how hot things get. I just take whatever results and mix it into the 5 gallon water buckets. Which are insulated with either the SmartPak cozies, or sit in insulated hard plastic holders (like heated buckets w/o power). It works surprisingly well – between my efforts, and horse body-heat, the buckets stay clear many nights. Worst case scenario is 1/2" of ice, which none of my herd has trouble clearing . . . and that’s just for a few hours until their bucket-heating servant returns. When you don’t have hot water on demand (or power) it’s all about consistently chasing the ice away

[Gloria]

50 gallon hot water heater in the tack room that shares the same wall as the wash by. We use it for everything, bathing, feeding,soaking, etc. There is also a sink and base cabinet at the wash bay, which turns out to be quite handy. That is where I clean my tack.

[Amber_Ridge]

Insulated and heated tackroom with a small 20gal? electric water heater. Tackroom thermostat is set at 50 for most of the winter. We do turn it up when we are threatened with a deep freeze. Barn is not insulated and winters are 3 months of constant below freezing temps and snow. Heated water buckets that are manually topped up with buckets of water from the tackroom are in the stalls. Wash stall has a shared insulated wall with tackroom and a insulated door access to water taps for stalls and wash stall. Water line runs four feet deep from the house and comes up in the shared wall. We have a timer on the hotwater heater that turns it off at 11:00pm and back on at 5:00am each night. We don’t hose down in the winter but will do a warm sponge bath under the radiant heaters in the wash stall. Don’t go cheap if you have cold weather or if there is more than one person expected at the barn.

[Fairview_Horse_Cente]

http://www.fennells.com/copper-coil-water-heater.html

[mmeqcenter]

Most of the barns I was in Ohio just didn’t have hot water.
The nicer ones had a hot water tank installed and used in the wash stalls and watering.
One barn had the house close enough to the barn that, if needed (frozen spigot, buckets, etc.) she’d just hook up two or three 100’ hoses and bring water out from the house kitchen sink. :lol:

In Ohio I never bathed in the winter.

[LockeMeadows]

Our hot water tank is in the restroom, which is located next to the wash stall. It works out quite well.

[susanne]

No electric or water in the barn — in fact, no barn. Just a run-in. We set up beet pulp in the bathroom, and our electric kettle gets a good workout every winter warming troughs. Fortunately, northwest Oregon is fairly temperate, even up in our hills, so we rarely whine. I do need to come up with a light, however.