I have a 250 gallon tank, I have neglected putting near the barn for a long time, but need to. Want to prepare its permanent home first with a slab and then put a small deck to hold the thing, up on, so have some kind of water pressure.
My intent was to have nipple waterers in each stall for the birds and something for the goat too, but I have muscovies and even though they are so much cleaner than the other ducks, they still mess up the water. What I'm afraid of, is that I will fix them a nipple waterer and there will be some back up and I will have dirty water lines, just like I do with the 30 gallon waterer I now am using in the coop.
I figured if I can have the birds getting rain water and have another 250 gallon tank, later put on the opposite side of the barn for the garden, then in a pinch, I could use that water.
Also, I recall someone on a thread....maybe here, or maybe BYC, that did this, and to keep the algae down, they kept an algae eater in the tank, along with a gold fish, whose sole purpose was to eat mesquito larvae. She claimed that she kept a special hose all the way at the bottom (where the poop would be), for the garden and anything that required clean water, was taken at a higher level. Made sense to me.
When I first married, my GM-IL had a big cystern in her backyard. FIL told me when he was young, they used to have to clean it out, just before the rainy season and some very, not so nice things, would be in the water. Bird skeletons and such. They'd just empty the tank and remove the yuck and scrub it clean and wait for God to fill it up again. And even if it was dirty, they knew thats where their drinking water came from.
Its nice to be prepared for a few of life's little emergencies.
