Hi! This is Melissa at Twin Oaks Family Farm/Twin Oaks Farm Poultry. Thanks very much for watching & commenting! Thank you also for the really interesting feedback & tips! That's greatly appreciated! I agree with you on the metal waterers...we've had metal ones, & they worked well for a long time, but they just weren't as user-friendly for us in general as these top-fill ones. We really do like these plastic ones that top-fill! We also like the 5 gallon buckets fitted with drinking apparatus...I think what we've used may be different than what you're describing...the cups fitted into holes drilled in a bucket sounds like a very good watering solution...we have fit drinking nipples into the bottoms of 5 gallon buckets, & then suspended the buckets from the ceiling in the laying hen coops, & the hens do really well with those. Still, our favorite watering solution is these top-fill plastic waterers. In the hen houses, we set a concrete block under them to raise the trays up to about the height of the hens' backs. That seems to keep the trays cleaner. Thank you again for the awesome insights. We appreciate it! Thanks for your time & effort supporting our channel & interacting with it. God bless you! Have a super weekend!

Hi, Buck! That is a great idea! I think you have a great point, & that would be even better & more user-friendly than top-fill waterers. Two reasons we didn't do that in this building is because we don't want a feed or water system spanning across the doorways & we want to be able to take down the entire meat bird set-up when we aren't raising meat birds. Automatic waterers along the walls is a great idea, though. We also talked about possibly an automatic feeder system being set up that way. Ended up not fitting our set-up, but automatic water & feed systems would be really awesome! Thanks for the great feedback, Buck! We appreciate it!!! God bless you!

But if would do you don't have to fill them up

@CluckinAround Hi! Melissa here from Twin Oaks Family Farm/Twin Oaks Farm Poultry. Thanks for watching & commenting! We greatly appreciate your input! We really like the top-fill waterers. Very user-friendly for us & gives us great water capacity for all our chickens! We have found them very easy to clean, very reliable, & very durable. Thank you again for watching & commenting! God bless you!

Thanks very much, Buck, for watching & commenting. Automatic fill waterers would definitely save a lot of time & work. It would save us from having to carry 5 gallon buckets of water back & forth, too. Thanks again! We appreciate your comments!!! God bless you!

Take time and time is money

Hi! Thanks for watching & commenting! Thank you for this feedback from your experience with this kind of waterer, too. I wanted to mention to you we had the same issue once with a couple of them in our little hen houses...it was so frustrating, because just as you said, it was like it made a swamp in the hen houses! It was an awful mess! I don't know if this will help you, & I realize you've probably already tried something like this, but we actually took them apart & cleaned between the bucket part & the tray part, & it straightened it right up. I'm trying to remember...drawing a bit of a blank just now...but I think it unscrewed somehow, or there's a threaded piece in there...anyway, there was leaves in ours somehow, & it was somehow interfering with the float, so the water just kept filling the tray instead of stopping, & cleaning that out did help us...just wanted to share that in case it might help you with your big waterer, too. That's a bummer it's leaking. I hope it's fixable; I know they're a bit of an investment, & you can't have water leaking out everywhere. Thank you again for watching & commenting! We're very grateful for your time & effort supporting our channel! God bless you & your family. Have a fantastic weekend!