Chicken House Irrigation System

Dedicated readers will remember that we slaved away to build a dining-room for the chickens which would keep their food and water out of the coop, making more space and less mess. The next job was to create an automatic watering solution to keep the chickens well-hydrated during the long hot summer.

There are many simple gravity-fed water troughs available at the farm shops but the problem we found was that without a flat surface to place one on, the water just drained away within minutes. Even without that problem, it would still need re-filling on a daily basis because of its limited capacity.

So I took an idea from a member of our gardening club and we recreated a more sophisticated gravity-fed trough.

This is what we used:

• A small water trough with ball cock
• A camping tank with a hose attachment at the base
  
• A length of hose attached to the tank and the trough
• Two cement blocks to give the tank enough height for the water to flow
• An old litter tray filled with sand to keep the water trough roughly level

If you want to do this yourself, you'll also need a hosepipe from your nearest tap or a gutter draining from the roof of the coop. When we replace the metal roof on our house, we'll create a primary water supply from the roofs over the coop and the run to save us dragging the hose down from the house water tanks every time.


You can also see the chooketeria in the photo above - the hen just needs to stand on the step and the lid opens up. This keeps sparrows and mice out of the food. But not peacocks.