I currently own three horses which are all stall kept. One of the three is in a stall that has an outside paddock that he can freely come and go out into. The other two horses get regular turnout when I rotate them into that stall for exercise. I am currently considering
I board my horses at a facility but do some of the routine care when I go every other day to ride all year round. I am wondering how I can address the issue of watering my horses in the best way possible.
Since we experience some severe winter weather where I live in Northwestern PA, the main issue is with freezing water buckets. The inside horses have two buckets in each stall that are hung on bucket hooks. I am currently using one heated bucket and one non heated bucket. The owner ran electrical outlets for me to use so that I could hook up the buckets allowing at least one bucket available even when the water froze in the other.
Well, you still have one bucket that freezes completely solid with whatever the horse didn't manage to drink before it froze. So, every time they are watered, you have to open the door, get the buckets down, go bang the ice out without breaking the bucket, refill the bucket, fill the heated bucket, go fill the bucket again and hang it back in the stall.
In the summer, we use a hose attached to the water faucet in the barn, but due to fear of freezing pipes when people don't drain the hose properly, we took the hose off for the winter.
This all amounts to a pain in the nether region when you are lugging frozen water buckets and carrying bucket after bucket to make sure your horses have water.
I would like to know, if anyone can offer a response....should I invest in some type of automatic waterers for them? Do they freeze up? How are the water lines run from the main source? If anyone has any valuable information, I would certainly love to hear it. I would be willing to pay for the upgrade in watering systems even though I am boarding, but want to know if this is a good option before I go there.
