Chicken watering system upgrade

Howdy All,

Recently we upgraded our watering system for our chickens. For those of you without chickens (most of you I suspect), chickens love to dig around in the dirt looking for grubs and worms. When they do this, they kick dirt all around their chicken run, and it inevitably ends up in their water! I did some research online, and found a great system using a bucket, PVC pipe, and little nipples for the chicken water, but it was expensive! So, we decided to build our own! 

Here is the heart of the system. These two piece nipples that just lock onto standard 3/4" PVC pipe. You have to drill a 5/16" hole in them, and the shape of the nipples lock around the PVC pipe. We ordered these from amazon, but they took forever to arrive at our house!

For the PVC, I shaped them into an "L," and had a "T" in the middle which went into a hose fitting. The ends were capped off. The PVC was glued with Christy's Red Hot Blue Glue.

After I drilled the holes, I cleaned them up with an exacto knife to deburr them, and blew air into the pipe to remove all of the little plastic shavings which might clog the nipples. I then added kitchen silicon sealant around the outside of the holes to prevent water from leaking. When plastic is in the sun, the UV rays break down the plastic and make it brittle. I didn't want the locking nipple parts falling off of the PVC pipe, so after the silicon dried, I then used Plastic Epoxy (5 minute set) to glue the nipple piece to the PVC pipe as a mechanical bond to prevent them from eventually slipping off.

On the outside out chicken coop, we attached a piece of wood (made from 2 4x4s, and two sheets of plywood) which would hold the water bucket. The piece is attached to a 2x4, which might be too weak for the weight of the water, so I'm keeping an eye on it to see if I need to beef it up a bit. Water is heavy!

Here is our large bucket. At the bottom, we attached a hose outlet. Some people have a facet valve at the bucket, but we choose to go without if for now.

Here is a good photo of what the watering system looks like inside the coop. Right now it is only attached with wire until we make sure that the chickens like the height that it is installed.

We bought a 3 foot hose to run from the bucket to the PVC pipe, but it turned out to be too long! The water had a hard time going into the PVC since the water hose trapped air in it. We eventually cut off about a foot and a half from the hose so that it is a straight shot to the PVC pipe. Since the new water bucket is 14 gallons, and our old waterer was maybe 1 gallon or two, we can go a lot longer without having to worry if the chickens have their water. As well, where we live we almost never have temperatures below freezing, or else this system wouldn't work in the winter.

Filling up the water bucket with water for the first time We also added a bit of wire around the bucket, which will prevent it from being knocked off of the bracket we placed it on.

Only one leak! And that's because I didn't tighten the hose enough! Once good and tight, no leaks!

Hopefully this will mean happy chickens, since they will have clean water, and a happy mother-in-law, who had to clean the water in the coop when we were on vacation! So far the chickens are bit confused by the watering system. We showed each of them how to peck at it, so that water would come into their mouths (chickens are not terribly bright). We held each of them, and then moved their beaks until water came out of each of the nipples. As well, we removed their old waterer to force them to learn how to work the new system.

We'll try to get a photo of the chickens actually using it! Happy gardening!

M & N