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Solar powered Chicken water de-iceing

🕑 Added 2025-01-09 20:59:02 +0000 UTC

Comments

Cull2ArcaHeresy

i thought the marbles were to distribute the heat from bulb out to bottle (to then go to water) to be better heat conductors than air, and adding weight so bottle will sink

CodyDon Reeder

I was going to use sand but I decided that I'd like to be able to see that the light was still working.

CodyDon Reeder

So far it seems to be doing fine. Just had a beautiful day with no clouds and it just managed to melt all the ice.

Adric Menning

then it will also need a electricidal battery. hes hoping it can be its own thermal battery with the marbles. (im thinking he may want to add some black sand to fill the gaps and add the mass.

Jeremy Sagnol

How did it end up? Did it work?

Stephen B. Sullivan

Almost 100% of the energy is converted to heat. How long till the chickens destroy the wires?

Jay Wyman

really surprising that small single bulb could make that much heat. very cool

MattsAwesomeStuff

I have one of those LEDs-in-a-tube type christmas lights, about a 1/2" tube... and I layed it across the side of my walkway over the snow and ice, to illuminate it. It carved a path straight through to the grass underneath in less than a day. It takes a very small amount of heat to keep water from freezing. But what would work even better than a solar panel, at 15% efficiency is... actual sunlight on a black bucket. If you consider the mild difference between solar intensity in the summer vs. winter, adding just one mirror to double the solar intensity on the object should be enough to keep it defrosted. To be visually effective, you could fill a different bucket next to it, and show how quickly it freezes over while the first one stays liquid, since, "a thing not happening" is a video about nothing (visually). Also, for whatever voltage that solar panel is, a simple one or two foot long piece of 18-24g stainless wire would accomplish the same thing without the fancy lightbulb. Stretched longer an on a car battery charger I've made hot-wire foam cutters, but, in this case the solar panels will be functionally just dead shorted and will only produce as much energy as they produce. You could tweak it by using thinner and longer wire, or a kettle element (and who cares if you give it 1/10 the voltage, it'll have 1/100th the power flow, or about 15 watts, about right. Lots of other ways to do this. I like how pretty it is.