Wooly Moss Roots: the ultimate automatic chicken waterer

Today's guest post is brought to you by Jeff. I told him he could have titled this post "The Coolest Chicken Waterer Ever!" That's how I feel about it. Not only does it automatically fill the water up on it's own, it is also the most sanitary way I know of for giving chickens water. Many of you know how quickly chickens can make a mess of their water and even with constant cleaning it's not ideal. Today Jeff will teach you how to make a waterer that you don't have to fill up or clean every day and that will contribute to much healthier chickens!
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How to Make the ULTIMATE Automatic Chicken Waterer

I don't know about you, but every day of my life I have about four days worth of work I need to have done right NOW. So whatever I can do to make things flow a little better, is a good idea.

One thing that was taking a fair bit of my time was watering the chickens every day. Haul the chicken waterer out of the coop and chicken yard, (it's a little heavy for Taryn) clean all the poop and food and straw out of the drinking tray, then clean it and fill it up and haul it back in. NO THANKS!

So I needed to make something automatic.

Years ago I had made the chickens a waterer out of an automatic water filling bowl, hooked up to the hose built over a screen with a drain.... But it still would get full of poop from them perching on the side. Then I moved that eventually into the goats pen to keep them watered.

Well the goats are gone so I took the float valve off the old bowl waterer....which is many years old, but still amazingly works. So now I had an automatic shut off.

We bought a nice big 5 gallon food grade bucket with a lid from Glory Bee Foods for $5.00. And some little feeding nipples from the Feed Store for a few dollars (very cheap) .

(Note from Taryn: at the feed store they call a chicken waterer with the nipples, "the chicken udder.")

And I had some heavy wire for tying it up.

So here's a list of needed supplies:

A big food grade bucket

Feeding Nipples from a Feed Store or Online

A float valve ( you can usually get pretty cheap from feed stores)

Some wire or chain or something to tie it up with.

Here's a close-up of the Nipples.

So the first thing I did was drill a hole in top for the float valve:

Then I drilled holes in the bottom to put in the Nipples.

Now a tip about this is pull the black part that goes into the bucket off, then put some coconut oil or something slippery like that on it, inside and out.....and push it into the hole on the bucket...THEN, put the nipple in it. Not trying to put the whole nipple assembly in at once will save a lot of time.

I made a wire frame around it because I don't trust the plastic handle to last a long time.... And hung it up in a tree in the chicken yard.

Then hooked it up to the hose.

It only took em about 5 minutes to figure it out on their own.

(Note from Taryn: Jeff made this waterer in the early morning a few weeks back. When Bracken and I came outside and saw what he was up to, we were all able to sit and watch as the chickens figured it out for the first time. They figured it out so much faster than we expected! It was really fun to watch. They simply press the metal part with their beaks and water comes out. Since these pictures, we've raised the waterer up a bit.)

Below they are gathered around the water tank discussing the new addition to the office..

(Note from Taryn: I came back later in the day to see them in action again. Our chicken named Bear wanted to be the star of the camera for a bit. She is such a character.)