Sunday, April 6, 2014

Automatic Water!

Today, I finished cleaning and repairing the rabbit cages. Then Rod helped me move them into a straight line and I hooked up the automatic watering system while Rod built me a shelf for the bucket to sit on.
Lily, one of the pet bunnies.
I've been trying to streamline our little homestead and this automatic watering system will reduce our chores by quite a bit. Now we just need to keep the bucket filled and run a check on the system once a month or so and all the rabbits will have clean drinking water on demand. At least until it freezes, then we'll still have to fill the bottles a couple of times a day, but we usually don't have more than a week of freezing weather per year, so that won't be that big of a hassle. I still have the water bottles hooked up for now until I'm sure everyone is using the new drinking valves.
Dr. Midnight, the other pet bunny looking at one of the meat rabbits.

 The hardest part of setting up this watering system was simply ordering the right parts. I had to place two orders because I accidentally ordered some 3/16 parts and some 5/16 parts and didn't order any converters to go between the two systems. Other than that the only difficult thing was finding a place 1 -3 feet above the hoses to put the 5 gallon bucket for the water. Rod had to build me a new shelf for that.
My next step in this whole set up is to move the quail cages/ worm bins out of the green house and put them under the bunny cages, then set up their watering system. I'm setting them up on their own system because I accidentally ordered those 5/16 parts and I decided that it will just be easier to set up a separate 5/16 system than to try to merge the two together or to return the wrong parts. This actually works out better anyway since the quail and worms will be going inside during the winter and this way I can still have them on automatic water when I do move them. See, I guess I didn't really make a mistake after all!




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