I’m not sure how you all feel about automatic waterers, but I personally think the hassles/worry outweighs their benefits. I like to monitor that my horse is drinking (like when I have a colic scare and the vet asks, “has your horse been drinking?”, well I have no clue if I have an automatic waterer). I also hate the electricity and the giant metal boxes that were my automatic waterers. Dede cut her leg pretty badly a few months ago, and the ONLY sharp thing in her pen was the side of that waterer. Mice and spiders can make homes inside your waterer, pipes break, I could go on and on….
I’ll let you in on a little secret, we used to have 15 waterers hooked up to water lines and electrical. I’m not sure how long you’ve been following us, but in case you didn’t know, we have ONE horse. So we had a 15:1 ratio of waterers to horses. Which is just plain silly. The other stupid thing about these waterers is that their shut off was above ground, i.e. we cannot just shut off the waterer in the winter, we must heat it so that we don’t have frozen, cracked pipes.. But wait, this gets better, within the year that we have lived in our house, we’ve already spent several hundred dollars fixing cracked pipes in these things! UGH. So about 3 weeks ago, when we had our first night below freezing (and after spending an hour hooking up and testing the water heaters), we called someone to get those things taken out. Two weeks ago, we embarked on getting rid of these darn things. First he dug one big hole outside, which shut off one hydrant and two of the waterers, then we dug some more holes and ultimately ended up finding a nice multi way connector right outside our barn, secured with sprinkler fittings….yes, our pipes that are supposed to hold constant water pressure, were being held on with sprinkler fittings. Anyway, as we’re in that hole, he began to tell us that we must have a leak somewhere because the ground was just way too wet in that area. I had my concerns when Harrison and I pulled out a silly half shed (more on that later…) in the spring and the post holes were filled with water – I thought that was pretty odd too. So then we go into the smaller barn that is attached to our indoor arena and he digs us a giant hole in there. We were pretty troubled when we found a pipe not even buried 2 feet down (i.e. above the frost line). But capping that pipe didn’t shut off the waterers, so we dug further (by we, I mean him – with his handy/fun machine). Lo and behold, another pipe, actually buried at the right depth! However, as this one was dug out, we discovered that this was a 3/4 inch pipe and 1 inch pipe, just shoved together (without a connector!) And, instead of, you know, doing this correctly, this person put some cement over the top of these two shoved together pipes to “seal” them… What. The. #@#%. The ground was soaked and the area around all the pipes was washed out from how much water has been leaking there. So, if nothing else, I am so happy that we found that little problem buried there, and it is now cut off and turned into a water hydrant. Now we have one water line, that we know where it is, and not all these weird junctions where leaks are occurring!! What a relief. If we need to find the pipe, we know where it is and where it ends, so we don’t have to go hunting for our leak problem if it ever happens again (I sure hope not).
I’d like to touch on the subject of doing what makes YOU feel better. If you are comforted by having automatic waterers, where you don’t have to hook up a hose to fill the water, then put them in (I have spares in case you’re looking). I went with what made me feel better. Ripping out the pipes and electric, and just filling a nice big water trough. Now I know that my horse is drinking, and I can watch her glug down several gallons at once, rather than a few slurps before having to wait for the water to refill for 30 seconds. The cost was so high to heat all those stupid things as well, that I felt way better getting rid of them and just running one trough heater! But, I would like to emphasize that my underlying point here is to do the thing that makes YOU, not your friend or your neighbor, happy and able to sleep better at night!
Leave a Reply