One of the most frequent problems our
customers email us about is a concern that their chickens aren’t
drinking enough water when they switch over to the Avian Aqua Miser
from traditional, gravity-feed waterers.  We’re all so used to
swishing half a gallon of water around the rim of our traditional
waterers to wash the poop loose that we don’t realize how little water
chickens actually drink.  As a result, we often think that the
water level is dropping far too slowly in our new automatic chicken waterers.



Chickens are pretty
small animals, and they usually drink less than half a cup apiece per
day.  On hot days they may drink as much as two cups apiece, and
we’ve noticed that our
old chickens are always heavy drinkers.  If you’re getting
started with the Avian Aqua Miser and are concerned that your chickens
aren’t drinking enough, try paying attention to the handy markings on
the side of the reservoir for a day to see if your chickens are getting
enough to drink.



Other customers see
their chickens drinking out of the Avian Aqua Miser, but still feel
like the birds aren’t getting enough hydration since they run back to
their old waterer when given the chance.  We’ve seen this in
action, and mused over it for a while before figuring out that chickens
are big fans of fresh water.  If you give them a traditional
waterer full of fresh water versus an Avian Aqua Miser full of three
day old, stale water, the chickens will run to the traditional waterer
every time.  On the other hand, if you give them an Avian Aqua
Miser full of fresh water, your chickens will run straight to the Avian
Aqua Miser (and will also get the benefit of not having to drink their
own fecal matter.)

One of our biggest shocks when we put the
Avian Aqua Miser in our tractors was how little water the birds
actually drank.  We’d been spilling a gallon or two of water a
day, trying to flush the poop out of our old waterers.  But when
the water reservoir is enclosed and chickens drink from a nipple, the
birds only consume about half a cup per day.

Temperature, obviously, affects our chickens’ drinking rate, but we’ve
discovered that age does too.  We have three tractors of chickens
— one contains three year old hens and the other two contain 16 month
old hens.  The older hens drink nearly twice as much as their
younger farm-mates!  I wonder whether the plentiful clean water in
our homemade
chicken waterers is the reason that our three year old hens are
still laying at nearly the same rate as the youngsters?