Brothers M. Mondays in May(MiM) is our tradition of sharing our excitement about our chickens every Monday in May.  This year’s Monday’s in May focus on Did it Work? We’ll look at some of the things we’ve done and give an update on how well it worked.

This week we’re looking at the PVC nipple waterers. I created 2 PVC watering systems, one for the portable chicken coop and one for our Chicken tractors. As you can probably tell by the picture, one of these didn’t work too well.

In the chicken tractor, I used a 10 foot length of 4 inch PVC with a shorter piece of 1 1/4 inch under it with nipples in it. This was attached to the side of the Chicken tractor for the chickens to drink from. The thought was that since it was attached to the tractor, we wouldn’t have to remove the waterer before moving the tractor.

We were able to train chickens to drink from it, but most still preferred the regular round waterer. The extra weight did make the chicken tractor heavier and a bit harder to move. Moving forward wasn’t too bad; however, without a cap on the open end of the pipe, moving backward just poured the water out when we raised the back of the chicken tractor with the dolly. Filling the water via the 4″ mouth hanging on the wall was also a pain. I scrapped them this year when I rebuilt 2 of the chicken tractors.

I also used an 8 foot length of 3 inch PVC to create a watering system on the portal chicken coop. It narrows down to a 1 1/4 pipe that goes under the side door and to a watering station around the wheel. I also added a 3 inch to 4 Inch elbow to the fill end to make it easier to fill the water.

This one works really well. I don’t raise the front of the coop high enough to allow the water to pour out and even if some did, I only move the coop once a week so it wouldn’t be a big problem. The main drawback of this is that the 3″ PVC doesn’t hold as much water as I’d like, and I should have put the fill farther out so it’s not under the roof. I think I’ll fix both of these with one of the 4″ PVC pipes from the chicken Tractor.