Chicken Fountain Automatic Waterer

After 2 years of hauling water for the several different founts I had for my birds, I was finally able to purchase The Chicken Fountain. I got the ten nipple fountain and installed it in my new chicken run and couldn’t be more pleased. I do have a buried water line to the fountain and it is in the shade so I don’t have any problems with the water being warm. However, frozen water bottles can be placed into the main water housing to cool the water. In addition, I have on multiple occasions unscrewed the end nipple to let the water flow thereby replacing the water that was in the fountain.

I chose to install the fountain in the middle of the run so the chickens can access BOTH sides of it. I nailed a strip of 1x6 to the fence post to hang the fountain on. I did go ahead and string some wire from the fence post to the 1x6 so they wouldn’t be tempted to roost on it. You know those crazy chickens.

To explain the heated fount hanging upside down: Since we don’t have many days (2 weeks max) cold enough to freeze the fountain, I choose to temporarily use a heated fount instead of insulating the Chicken Fountain on those few days. I installed a water cutoff to the fountain so I could stop the water and drain it if necessary.

I haven't used the Chicken-Fountain (and it is no longer available), but took a great part of inspiration and ideas from it to build a maintenance free waterer for my Duckies.

We bought $40 worth of tube insulation to put on our white water hose and the water still gets hot. My husband plans on burying the water hose but we don't have a place in the shade for the fountain so right now I've got an umbrella over it. It's very windy here on the coast of Texas so that's not a complete solution to keep it cool. I've been putting frozen bottles of water in the top but they melt really fast and need replaced. It works great, it's just the heat here that's causing us problems. It won't get cool here until November/December unless we have an early winter. I can't put the fountain in my coop due to the wood floor and I don't have the space for it. We don't have a run, our chickens free range on 1/2 acre fenced yard. I'm not disappointed in the fountain because it's working so far but my chickens need lots of cool water to drink and this has not been a good solution for us.

Update:
We put double and triple pipe insulation around the garden hose and then around the fountain. That helped and then the chickens started eating the insulation on the fountain so I wrapped the insulation on the fountain with white cloth. All that with adding a frozen water bottle each day has helped reduced the water temperature. I also keep an umbrella over it during the day. We're in the middle of a heat wave but when we get some rain and the ground gets soft, we'll bury the water hose.