I need to get a couple of these. What do you do with your rain water? Garden and chickens? I was thinking it would be good to put one closer to the chicken coop and just let them drink that. I elevated their waterer on a stump last week and I don’t think they drank from it once. Usually they run straight to it in the morning but they haven’t done that even though I lowered it. So they are drinking rain water anyway I’m just not sure from where…
We got it for emergency non-potable water use, after going without even dirty water from the taps for flushing toilets, for so long (weeks) after Helene. These two collect water from an asphalt-shingled house roof, so not for chicken drinking. I’m resigned to having to roof the whole 8x15 run with corrugated polycarbonate panels, so we’ll collect that for chickens.
We were fortunate-we only missed two days of water. I also hope to never experience anything like Helene again though. Kind of ironic that everyone in the country was stocking up on toilet paper and bottled water for Covid and of course I didn’t buy any then and I didn’t buy any before Helene. The toilet paper I still don’t understand but the bottled water makes sense. At least for hurricanes…
We got it for emergency non-potable water use, after going without even dirty water from the taps for flushing toilets, for so long (weeks) after Helene. These two collect water from an asphalt-shingled house roof, so not for chicken drinking. I’m resigned to having to roof the whole 8x15 run with corrugated polycarbonate panels, so we’ll collect that for chickens.
Anyway, the irony is that I took the two dozen empty plastic jugs we’d used for so long to recycling, never wanting to see them again, so now we need a way to store the water.
The double irony is that if there’s enough rainwater to fill the barrels, nothing in the yard needs watering.
Anyway, I hope never again to need to calculate how many gallons are needed to flush a toilet times 4 (each person gets 2 flushes a day.) This was immediately after the hurricane washed out roads and water couldn’t be trucked in. Scooping water from the filled-up bathtub into a toilet tank kept us going for a couple of days…
I’m very much hoping that things don’t get this bad again! Much of our backyard is a bit of a composting toilet for chickens, though.
Off to excavate the roofed portion of the run, which has gotten a bit ripe.
You’re not asking me but I would like to warn you to install a rainbarrel for the chickens.
That's shocking, if true (that a dead mouse can poison the water; I'm not doubting that it might be thought to be the case, only whether or not it is actually possible). Free ranging chickens would have been able to source alternative water supplies normally, so if true it's another case where confining chickens did not keep them safe.
My husband and I rented a boat without flushing water once. It had a compost toilet. I think we had to add some-kind of flavoured sawdust after
. Worked fine. Nothing complex. Just a bucket with a lid. And there was no smell at all. 
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