Warming the bird bath... first rinky dink project of 2016

We made our first rinky dink project of 2016.  I do so love a rinky dink project, especially when we collaborate. They say whatever you do on the first day of the year is what you will do for the rest of the year.   So I hope there are LOTS of rinky dink projects in our upcoming year.

When it gets cold like this I know that water is the most important thing to keep available for the birds and squirrels.  The bird bath heaters I've found for sale are clumsy and difficult to install plus expensive.  It occurred to me that our small bird baths have a hollow column they sit on.  So I asked John to make a light bulb warmer for inside the column.

We've used simple light bulb warmers in the past for cold frames and such so we think it will work.  We started with a 40 watt bulb.  I am keeping an eye on the water temperature.

Update next morning: it worked great!  It's been very cold and windy (28 with a wind chill of 16 degrees).  We have two of these bird baths and only one is heated.  It froze within an hour or two and is a solid block of ice this morning.  The heated one is 46 degrees.  Yessssss!!!!!  I think we will be heating the second one, too.

Here you can see what is inside the column.

And here it is installed on the side porch.  I like that you can see it is on.  The upper right corner is the ice I dumped out of it.  It can be hard to get the ice out so I hope this fixes that problem.