One of the many joys of chickens is that you have the ability to make their care as simple and automated as possible.
With the plans of a new coop, comes the desire to automate you chicken's care as much as possible. One of the easiest ways to do so is by making sure the chickens always have access to fresh water.
We live in a part of the country where it rains, often. With that knowledge we use a rain barrel collection system to contain all of the runoff for our chickens. Although we have water access near by, there still is a requirement of human interaction. With a rain collection system everything is left to nature and gravity to give the chickens what they need.
Water collection and storage: Let me start with, we have MANY chickens, so a typical 50 gallon or multiple 50 gallon barrels was just not cutting it for us. We chose to go with a 325 gallon water storage tank. Our neighbors were moving and offered us one with a pump for a very low price, well we couldn't resist. Our coop is a single slope run off, approximately 30 sq. feet running into one gutter that drains to the water tank.
Gravity fed chicken waterer: The tank has a single spout or drain location nearer the bottom of the reservoir. This is connected to a PVC pipe which then feeds into the chicken run. The PVC pipe is mounted to the outer edge of the chicken coop and drilled with 11/32" to fit the Rentacoop watering nipples. Rentacoop also carries self-filling watering cups that can be used in an identical way. So long as the water tank is higher than the top edge of the PVC pipe, water feeds into the pipe so the chickens always have access to water. We still have to build a platform and configure everything properly, but I am hopeful that we can make it all work!
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