Water buckets and feeders - cleaning and maintenance

[chickenpaprikas7]

Good morning,

Wanted to get feedback on how people clean their water buckets. I have two smaller -- 1 gallon each -- gravity buckets and I'm like, how do you expect to get the inside clean? Then, I have one 2 gallon hanging thing where you have a full cover that goes over and with a turn clicks in.

What is the best way to clean these buckets? How often do they need to be disinfected? Looking to see what others do. Again, one set of buckets, gravity bucket, I can't "open", the other I can open fully. What cleaning products do you use and how often.

Much thanks in advance for the wonderful advice I know I will receive.

 

[blissfulbirds]

For our flock, we have a bucket ( i think it’s 2 or 3 gallons?) that gets filled about every other day and we scrub out the dirt and grime with a little bit of soap and a good rinse. A little less often we will clean it with a little bit of bleach to disinfect, making sure that we rinse it super well before filling with drinking water!

 

[chickenpaprikas7]

For our flock, we have a bucket ( i think it’s 2 or 3 gallons?) that gets filled about every other day and we scrub out the dirt and grime with a little bit of soap and a good rinse. A little less often we will clean it with a little bit of bleach to disinfect, making sure that we rinse it super well before filling with drinking water!

Awesome, thank you. This is the direction that I thought I'd be going in, but wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing any fancy-shmancy products out there.

Even for basics like this, as a new chicken mama, it's great to have some feedback.

 

[LaFemmeKatia]

I clean everything with Clorox. It gets rid of dirt, stains, algae, germs, you name it. I do it every other day.

 

[Acre4Me]

We have some plastic bell shaped waterers -super common. They are 5Qt, I think. We bought extra so that if one needed scrubbing, it was easier to get a fresh clean one, then clean, at leisure, the dirty one. Then the cleaned one thoroughly dries out in the barn until needed. When they get a deep clean, it is scrubbed with dish soap. If really dirty for some reason or has been awhile, we will give it a soak In bleach. Again, it gets set aside until a fresh one is needed. Usually a bell waterer is rinsed daily, with hose, then scrubbed out a bit with a small scrubber with handle we leave by the hose -this gets off dust, debris and any scum that might be trying to form on the bottom part. After 2-3 days, it will always get switched out for a fresh waterer. These waterers have only 2 parts, easy to clean.

we also have a 5 gallon, double wall, galvanized waterer. This gets refreshed every other day. We keep it in full shade. When refreshed, we use the handy scrub brush by the hose. A few times a year it gets a full on scrub out with soapy water and rinsed well, and dried out. No bleach is used on the metal waterer.