Never Have to Water Your Chickens Again!

This post may contain affiliate links which won’t change your price but will share some commission.  Thank you for supporting us!

I am so excited – we may never have to water the chickens again!!! This setup has been months in the making and is finally complete. While our new waterer is simple and was a fairly easy install, it took us so long to complete because it was a low priority. But, now that it is complete, chicken chores will be so much easier!

What We Made

We have a 55 gallon plastic food grade barrel that James attached 4 poultry water cups to. We found the barrel on Facebook Marketplace. It previously held pickles, so we were not at all concerned with the previous contents being an issue for the chickens. We’ve had the water cups on the barrel for months and I’ve been hauling water in 5 gallon buckets to partly fill it up every few weeks. But now, I hope to never have to do that! We finally put a gutter on the back of our chicken coop and have a downspout that directs the rainwater to the barrel. We removed the lid insert and replaced it with window screen and then put the ring part of the lid back on. This screen will keep debris and mosquitos, out of the water.

How Well is it Working?

We got about 1.25 inches of rain a couple of days ago, which was more than enough to fill the barrel up the rest of the way. Sunday morning, we had a low of 16 degrees. By about 10:30, the ambient temperature was above freezing and when I checked the chicken waterer, there was liquid water in the cups. This means that I’ll only need to worry about providing water for those few days when our daytime temperatures stay below freezing.

Now that our chickens have a 55 gallon waterer, 5 gallon bucket feeders, and an automatic coop door, their daily care has become minimal. If you haven’t already seen it, you can take a tour of our original chicken coop here. What have you done to simplify your chicken chores?

---