Chicks keep putting heads under hot water bottle?

[aart]

What is the ambient temp where the chicks are?
How often do you have to warm up the hot water bottle?
Any idea what the surface temp of the bottle is?
They may not be warm enough.

 

[Debbie292d]

We're going to a poultry swap that is one hour away, and for the first time, bringing chicks instead of buying chicks. We'll have about 2 dozen silkies at 2-weeks old and some just a few days old. We have an inverter (converts and boosts DC into 110V) that fits in the cigarette lighter or, once parked, has cables for the battery, but thought I'd see about using hot water bottles instead of heating pads. I saw some 2L ones on Amazon that boast to hold the heat for 3 hours. You can microwave them or pour boiling water inside, and most come with thick coverings to put over them. We'd cover it and bury it in horse pellets in the bin, which would carry/hold the heat. We could also wrap a spare one in a couple of heavy towels that could be used should the first one start losing heat before we're home.

If this doesn't work out, we'll still bring the heating pads and inverter, but I'll update how it went. This trip is not until 6/3/23, but we can try to test it beforehand.

As a side note, we have two brooders and use 150W black ceramic in one and 100W ceramic bulb in the other. The larger bulb in the larger brooder we recently bought a thermostat for. It helps keep the temp range tighter than the dimmer switch was.