Automatic water drinkers

wombles

Was just wondering what other peoples views are on automatic drinkers vs water buckets (to settle a debate between myself and a friend!)

Whilst I agree that automatic drinkers are a great back up to ensure that horse is not without water at any time, I think that it is impossible to check what your horse is drinking - which can be a signal that something is wrong.

Opinions?

napoles

It's a tricky one.. but I have to say that we use automatic drinkers at home. The amount of work involved with carrying, cleaning and filling water buckets for a number of horses several times a day is a real pain.
I am very aware that you can't really monitor their water intake with most auto drinkers, so I just keep a good eye on things and also watch how much they stale.

convert

I'm not a fan of automatic water drinkers at all. Like you've both acknowledged, it's exceptionally difficult to monitor whether or not the horses are drinking sufficiently (or at all!). There's also the problem of them getting clogged up, not working properly, etc. While I realise that carrying several buckets of water to a number of horses is tedious and a lot of manual labour, I'd still choose that over the automatic water drinkers.

Tigrrrr

We use automatic fillers for the outer paddocks only, and then for the yard and the yard paddocks there are buckets. The reason for this is that horses in outer paddocks are kept in groups and water monitoring is impossible anyway. On the other hand, boxes and isolation paddocks are quite different (as well as closer to taps!) and manual labour is best here.

Borderfox

They automatic fillers in the stables where I have my Horse but it doesnt matter what time it is, if I give him a bucket of water he will always drink some (I think he just likes anything in a bucket) tbh I would prefer to know how much he drinks.

wombles

I posted the same question somewhere else and someone gave an intresting link http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/rirdc/articles/miscell/water.html

It looks like it has been proved that horses prefer drinking from buckets anyway, so its not just the monitoring.

Borderfox

I would agree with that Wombles