Winter Water Solutions

[janelle18]

At the start of winter I asked around about what people were doing to keep their flock watered in the winter. Unfortunately none of the options really worked for my situation. My birds are divided into 8 different pen, by breed. Therefore it would be too costly to run heaters to all of the automatic waters that I use during the spring/summer/fall. Finally I came up with a solution and so far has worked really well for me.
I decided to get 'coop cups' for each pen, similar to the ones here found on amazon:
http://www.amazon.ca/Ethical-Stainl...S370/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1359161006&sr=8-2
I also have the 20 oz model.

This worked for me because
-It didn't take up much space
-easily attaches and detaches from the hardware cloth
-are easy to clean
-hold enough water

I water my birds twice a day, once in the morning and once late afternoon. If the bowls have frozen then I take the bowl out of the hanger and bang it out into a separate bucket. Since the bowls are stainless steel I don't have to worry about them breaking and the ice pops out easily. I can also adjust the height so that the bowls don't get dirty! If the bowl is empty then i use a funnel to fill it from the outside.

This system has worked great for me, and a reasonable price with the bowls being very inexpensive!





this is what i use to water from outside the pen, my dad taped a fuel nozzle onto my funnel to make it easier


all of the frozen disc's from banging out the cups!

 

[chicks are me]

This seems like a good idea because my waterer keeps freezing. How cold is it where you live?

 

[thebanthams]

cool idea, we only have a short freeze last week, I had to hauled water from the house. it wasn't fun to do when its so cold!

 

[janelle18]

This seems like a good idea because my waterer keeps freezing. How cold is it where you live?

I am in southwestern Ontario. Last week it was -16 celcius (-29 with windchill), so 3 degree's fahrenheit!

 

[RavenWood]

I use rubber feed tubs - because they are rubber it is really easy to break ice out of them (just over turn them and stomp) and they don't freeze as quickly as metal receptacles.

 

[jasmer]

We're going to deep litter our chicken coop and run this coming spring. I've heard that since it's pretty much just compost it gets pretty hot, and can even give off some heat through winter and shouldn't freeze. Currently we're just using an electric heated dog bowl for the chickens, as well as a small one for the rabbit, and they work well but they need to be refilled once or twice a day. We do have a large rubber water tub that we were using, but our two bantam hens had a hard time with it toward the end of the day. The deep litter supposedly gets plenty warm, though, and coupled with maybe a little heat lamp during the day keeping the water in an enclosed area like inside the hen house might help keep it from freezing (too quickly at least). Might try that this year.

 

[janelle18]

The nice thing about the hanging cups is they don't get dirty or filled with shavings, which I feel would be a problem if they were ground level. I use deep litter as well but it doesn't give off enough heat to keep water from freezing, especially in a large space