During our net this morning ( January 4, 2022 ) discussion came up about how our tiny feathered friends are doing in the recent cold snap, this was something I tried to keep one of our hummingbird feeders from freezing up.

I was looking at ideas for using small heating pads to keep it de-iced when I ran across what this fellow did on YouTube, it is so simple and inexpensive that I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

It uses four 1/4 watt 100 ohm resistors in parallel epoxied to the bottom of the feeder, then an old USB charger and cable to supply power to it, the resulting output being 1 watt with the 5 volts supplied by the charger.

I made one exactly like this and it worked fairly well, the top couple of inches froze during the cold snap, however if I put less solution in the feeder it probably would work better, I am also considering trying the same setup using eight 1/2 watt 100 ohm resistors to increase the output to 2 watts total, splitting them into two groups of four to distribute the heat more evenly too.

Below is a link to the You Tube video and a couple of photos of my feeder, hopefully this is of interest to people, it certainly is helpful to these little birds.

USB Heated Hummingbird Feeder