Useful things: Hot shower

Last week I posted about the new love of my life - straw pellets (the details for the company are on that post for those wanting to order or enquire).   This week, I've got what I think is another really useful piece of kit to recommend to you - a hot shower for the yard. 

We put hot water in the barn  - via a bog-standard electric shower - a few years ago but although it was a big improvement on no hot water it had a few drawbacks.  The water pressure wasn't great and because it had a standard shower fitting it was quite vulnerable to horses treading on it or being dropped(!)...

I'd been keeping an eye out for a replacement and saw this on Facebook over the summer.  It runs off gas, instead of electricity, and hooks straight into the existing water supply so there is better pressure.

There are some glitches.  The gas ignition is via 2 D batteries which is fine in principle but it eats battery power so you need to remember to switch it off after every time you use it or you have a lot of (expensive) dead batteries.   It also comes with a lack of good instructions so you need to work out pretty much on your own how everything fits together which is probably easier for some people than for me... Finally, because it costs the best part of £200, you need enough horses to justify the expense.

On the plus side, its fantastically useful to have readily available hot water, the hose is heavy duty and long enough to reach most bits of a horse without difficulty and the spray supplied has several different settings so you can have a single jet, a fine mist or anything in between.

Its proved to be great for washing off cuts or scrapes and marvellous when you have wet, muddy horses to clean off after hunting.   Even horses who hate being washed off (like Dexter and Bailey) stand under the hose with a blissful expression when they realise its warm, and its got to be a lot better for tired muscles too.

This is the video the company have made - and the shower pretty much does exactly as it appears to do here.  If anyone is interested in acquiring one, the company's Facebook page is here and they are very helpful.