Brower MPO1RE Performance One Electric Heated Box Stall Drinker, Red

Updated Post-Freeze Winter Review (initial purchase review is below):OK, everything about my previous review is true (sort of). But then winter came along, with freezing weather. At first when the temperature dropped below freezing just a little, everything froze. Inside, outside, tubes underneath ... everything. I figured I just hadn't done enough to insulate it. So we built enclosures all the way to the ground, packed them with insulation, sealed them, and declared victory. Then we had some short freezes in the 20's, and "a few" of them froze that had mounts on the inside of an exterior wall. So I actually installed a shop-heater into my 9-stall barn, which kept temperatures about 15-degrees higher than outside. I figured hey ... heated barn, heavily insulated, premium-priced heated stall waterers ... what could go wrong?A couple of early night freezes that didn't get out of the 20's with days back into the 40's, and everything worked fine ... TOUCHDOWN ... right? Not so fast. We just had our first freeze in the teens and single digits that hung around a couple of days. That said, the inside of the barn never got below the high teens (due to my shop heater running constantly), but the stall-drinkers all froze solid, every one of them ... horses would have needed an ice-ax to get any water (but they don't have thumbs so that's not an option). The inside reservoir right around the heating element was unfrozen, but the outside water compartment froze solid, all the little inner-workings froze, and all the tubing in the base froze in spite of all the insulation we'd packed around it. Except for the water right around the heating element, the whole thing was a block of ice.BTW ... for those of you thinking I just did something "wrong" ... we tested the electrical (solid) ... we tested the underground water supply to the feeder hose (perfect) ... we wrapped the plastic tubing underneath in pipe-insulation, and then packed wall-insulation around it. Everything we could think of to help these gadgets work ... we did, and then some. They just don't work in sub-20-degree freezes that hand around for more than a day. Period ... end of story.So here is my official assessment of this product:(1) It's absolutely wonderful in non-freezing climates ... the best product on the market by far. Great design, easy to clean, simple to adjust ... very well-made product.(2) It's "just OK" in light-freeze climates where the temperatures bump below freezing, but don't stay there ... as long as you insulate really well around the base ... because in light-freeze climates what will freeze first, is the little plastic feeder tubes from the water supply.(3) It's completely useless in really cold climates (but could be useful as a "Curling Stone"), and the "7 days at -30 degrees" represented on the Brower web site is pure and total "manure" ... forget about the tubing and supply lines ... it couldn't even keep the animal accessible water reservoir unfrozen in the high-teens and low-20's, nor could it keep the internal float mechanism unfrozen that's in the same general compartment as the heating element.Now one thing I wanted to give kudos to the company on is their Customer Service. They're just terrific ... and a couple of early experiences with defective internal parts during installation were handled quickly and without question. Also, when I did all the right things, and these gadgets still froze in the 20's during the very first freeze of the year, I assumed I'd gotten a bad batch of heating elements. There's just no way that 12-of-12 could all freeze solid in the first freeze of the year without something being really wrong. I called, and they sent me a dozen new heating elements overnight. I had no idea how important that would be, but it his huge over the last 48 hours of temps between 0 and 20 when all the stall drinkers froze solid, and I had to use those big Home Depot orange paint buckets to get water to my horses. Each one of those buckets has a spare heating element in it, and that's our frozen stall-drinker contingency through this extended freeze in Central Oregon. I now know that when the freeze is coming ... I need to implement my "Bucket with Heater" contingency and not wait for the inevitable frozen stall waterer.The one thing that makes me go "Hummm ..." is that when the heating element is placed in a 10-gallon bucket of water, it keeps the whole thing nicely un-frozen. But put that same heating element in it's designed spot inside the stall drinker ... and the only thing that doesn't freeze at 15-degrees is the water in the little heater-holder-compartment. Everything else is solid ice.Bottom line ... my search for a true "Freeze-Proof" stall water solution continues. In the meantime, my buckets and spare heaters (compliments of Brower) will be my contingency when temperatures drop. Because the product clearly doesn't do what it says it will do, I've dropped from my initial 5-star rating, to 1-star. Whoever tested this thing at -30 for 7 days ... was clearly smoking some of that great stuff that's available all over the place in Oregon. You just can't represent a product that's off by a 50-degree swing (says -30 / freezes at +20), and expect customers to be OK with that.Initial Purchase Review Follows:Bought one of these things to try it out, since I was tired of using stock-tanks and floating heaters in my Oregon climate where standard stall waterers don't work due to freezing. This thing worked so well, that I bought 12 of them ... one for each of nine horse stalls, one for the goat pen, and one for each pasture. It's a great design, and incorporates solutions to all the standard problems. Obviously this was designed by someone that has experienced those problems in the past. Bravo Brower ... and THANKS !!!

Easy to install.