I'm going to surprise a friend whose a somewhat poor family man with three nice fire LED lamps and a timer. The plan is to get it all ready and then to roll up on a Saturday or Sunday pretty soon to have my worker install it all over the course of some hours.

So I've been asking him questions about his porch area for a while already. I've been spanning it out so that he doesn't get suspicious, but I think that he's starting to think that I'm a bit autistic. I asked him what color that he plans on painting his house. He answered, but then asked "why?". "Just wondering". So I didn't have much else to say to him and so that was a fairly lame conversation in total.

I tricky part was getting him to send me pictures of his porch without raising suspicion. I allowed a week to go by without asking for them again. I uses the excuse that my wife likes an aspect of it and we're thinking about it for ourselves.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH [evil laugh]. The lights will burn!!! BURNN!!!!! BURNNN I say!

I bought a few 10W aquarium heaters for Winter. It seems that even one will work pretty well. When it starts getting about -10C every day for a week at a time then what will happen is that there will be just 1-2mm of ice on the top which I'll need to break every morning. It will be difficult to prevent it from freezing at all. It's fine though because there is a massive difference between slightly frozen water and that which is completely solid.

It will probably be enough, although the very coldest days will just be a bit annoying regardless. We actually have a pretty warm European climate in Tiraspol. It's about 2-3C warmer than Chisinau, which isn't all that bad. I'm also in one of the warmest micro climates in the immediate region, which contributes about another 1C.

The future plan will be to have the Winter water inside of the cheaper part of the greenhouse. It will be contained in polyfilm, which should make it have a pretty nice Winter temperature that ought to be a premium place for the chickens to hang out during total blizzards like what we just had.