Keeping Waterers from freezing?

[Kirkwooder]

Has anyone ever tried to use beet root juice/powder in their waterer to prevent freezing? I know it is used to de-ice roads and I saw a Facebook post about it, but cannot seem to find anyone who has actually tried it or uses it.

 

[saysfaa]

I researched this idea and ended up with an insulated bucket instead.

Beet juice on roads works mostly by making the normal road salt sticky. It will work by itself for deicing roads if the concentration of the beet sugar is high enough. The higher the concentration of sugar, the lower the freeze point. A ten percent solution freezes at about 22 degrees F (-5 or -6 C).

I wasn't willing to give them that much sugar even if worked better than my alternatives.

At 22F, the water in my 3-quart vacuum-sealed ice bucket (made to chill wine) took over 12 hours to get a skim of ice on top. Well, during the day, when they disturbed the surface by their drinking that is. Since they don't drink after dark, I could have refilled their bucket once a day and given them all they wanted. I checked them twice a day anyway.

If you have a larger flock; it gets easier to use insulation.

The other reason I didn't do it is the sugar keeps the water fluid but it doesn't keep it warmer. I think water too far below freezing (pth, below the freezing point of tap water, that is) could damage their throat or mouth tissues when they drank it. I know they will eat really cold snow but they can't eat that as fast as they can drink.

 

[K0k0shka]

There's a cutesy AI-generated image going around social media with a blurb that says Sweden is using "edible" road salt that contains beet juice instead of salt, and is "hydrating" wild birds who eat it, which is totally fake. I don't know if that's where you're getting the idea that beet juice is used to de-ice roads, but it's actually not. It could work, to extend the effect of the actual salt by lowering the freezing point even further, but it doesn't work on its own. You'd need a really really high concentration of it to make it work on its own - basically so much beet in the solution that it disrupts the water molecules from joining up in the crystalline structure of ice. But that would be a LOT of beet juice - too much to be good for your birds, and too expensive and impractical to use on a large scale like on roads.

Here's the "edible beet ice-melt" fake news debunked by Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/...t-salt-de-ice-roads-nourish-birds-2025-11-21/

 

[Cloverfluff]

I tried the beet juice method, the molasses method, and the salt in a bottle. None of them really worked with the way that my chicken waterers are set up. The molasses method and beet juice worked okay with the bulk of the water, but the main issue was the base. The water is so shallow where they drink that it froze no matter what. The salt in a bottle I think would work better with movement, so it may be more successful in a livestock bucket, where they move the bottles/jugs when they drink. I've just been swapping out their water buckets and adding warm water when I replace them.

 

[Rillowen]

I dug a 3 ft deep hole and put the water tin over the hole set mostly into the ground, covered at night/in the coop. It works amazingly well, only froze twice on the top from nights that reached -20F. Might need a deeper hole in colder regions (I'm zone6). I learned about it from a YouTube video from a man in Canada, there his hole was 6ft.

 

[Jachicks]

I researched this idea and ended up with an insulated bucket instead.

Beet juice on roads works mostly by making the normal road salt sticky. It will work by itself for deicing roads if the concentration of the beet sugar is high enough. The higher the concentration of sugar, the lower the freeze point. A ten percent solution freezes at about 22 degrees F (-5 or -6 C).

I wasn't willing to give them that much sugar even if worked better than my alternatives.

At 22F, the water in my 3-quart vacuum-sealed ice bucket (made to chill wine) took over 12 hours to get a skim of ice on top. Well, during the day, when they disturbed the surface by their drinking that is. Since they don't drink after dark, I could have refilled their bucket once a day and given them all they wanted. I checked them twice a day anyway.

If you have a larger flock; it gets easier to use insulation.

The other reason I didn't do it is the sugar keeps the water fluid but it doesn't keep it warmer. I think water too far below freezing (pth, below the freezing point of tap water, that is) could damage their throat or mouth tissues when they drank it. I know they will eat really cold snow but they can't eat that as fast as they can drink.

 

[Jachicks]

We have successfully been using a small pond heater in a 5 gal. bucket/with lid and nipple feeders. Is working great. Our days and nites have been down to 0 and low negatives.