Drinking water and swimming water

[AKnewbie]

Do you keep those separate?
Do the ducks even drink from a separate drinking container if they have their swimming pool?
We have a small kiddie pool that holds about 25-30gallons of water and a gallon container of water that is placed in another area in the run.
I change the water in the gallon container twice a day and for the pool, I dump it out and change water every other day. Water is usually light brown at this point.
We have 2 ducks.
Do I need to be switching out the water more often?

 

[70%cocoa]

I'd say that what you are doing is fine. I more or less do the same - each pen has swimming water plus a container that they can't climb into for drinking (basically it means they have some water that hasn't been pooped in). They drink out of both though. I change both the drinking and swimming water every day in pens with more than two ducks but occasionally I'll skip a day in the pen with two ducks because they don't mess it up too much. For drinking containers I use wall mounted automatic waterers and small plastic tubs. Will post a pic later

Edit: Here are a couple of pics.

Here's the trough I use for swimming (well, that the ducks use, that is!). It's about 15 gallons:

Here are two 'drinking' containers I use (sorry about it being sideways....). The blue one on the wall is about 2 gallons and the white tub is about 3 gallons. The don't get into either of them and even though they do get dirty at least they don't have poop.