The Hazards of Picking Up Chicks
Jun. 8th, 2009 12:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
errantemberSo I've had my chickens for several months now, and overall it's been a fun and worthy adventure. They're goofy to watch, fun to chase (according to Loki) and produce an average of 3 eggs per day. They're not *quite* paying for themselves so far, but the food they consume in a week is roughly equal to the value of the eggs they produce, so they're not doing badly at all. I've been making piecemeal improvements to the coop generously donated by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spottedvasa, including an automatic waterer made out of a toilet valve. One problem with this otherwise groovy system, however, is that it never drains, and therefore has become something of a mosquito factory.
Because the toilet valve is doing the slow-leak thing that older valves often do, I'm usingkitty_smack's watering timer, borrowed probably years ago now, to feed it with water for only five minutes a day. The water slows down a lot when the toilet valve should be stopping, and this fills it right to the top without overflowing. It occurred to me that an easy solution to the mosquito problem, besides simply nuking the planet into a charred glowing husk hurtling through space, might be to put a drain on the bottom of the waterer with another timer. At whatever interval mosquito larva might be big enough to see what's coming, but still too small to hatch, it would activate and dump all the water out into the compost heap, a nearby tree, or perhaps Dick Cheney's gas tank.
So I went shopping to Home Depot for timers and hardware, only to discover that the timers in question are about $30 retail. I'm way too broke right now to pony up that kind of money just for a fancy chicken waterer, so I proceeded over to Ebay to find a used one. It might also be worth a post on Austin Freecycle. However, it *then* occurred to me that I already have a timer of sort...my sprinkler system. I haven't used it since I took my Permaculture Design Course years ago, but it's still there, and it still works. And, it has *timed* valves! And it was at that point that I realized there were entire *systems* of electrically controlled watering hardware sitting down at Home Depot just *waiting* to become part of some crazy permie chicken-watering project!
For the time being, I think I'm simply going to re-route the least-important valve on the sprinkler system as the input to the chicken waterer, and use a stand-alone timer on the output, since I don't really want to hack up the existing system *too* much. At that point the waterer will be re-filled once day automatically, and periodically drained. Not only will this prevent new mosquitoes from being produced in my yard, but it will *also* cause existing ones to waste their precious eggs into a system from which they will never return!
spottedvasa, including an automatic waterer made out of a toilet valve. One problem with this otherwise groovy system, however, is that it never drains, and therefore has become something of a mosquito factory.Because the toilet valve is doing the slow-leak thing that older valves often do, I'm using
kitty_smack's watering timer, borrowed probably years ago now, to feed it with water for only five minutes a day. The water slows down a lot when the toilet valve should be stopping, and this fills it right to the top without overflowing. It occurred to me that an easy solution to the mosquito problem, besides simply nuking the planet into a charred glowing husk hurtling through space, might be to put a drain on the bottom of the waterer with another timer. At whatever interval mosquito larva might be big enough to see what's coming, but still too small to hatch, it would activate and dump all the water out into the compost heap, a nearby tree, or perhaps Dick Cheney's gas tank.So I went shopping to Home Depot for timers and hardware, only to discover that the timers in question are about $30 retail. I'm way too broke right now to pony up that kind of money just for a fancy chicken waterer, so I proceeded over to Ebay to find a used one. It might also be worth a post on Austin Freecycle. However, it *then* occurred to me that I already have a timer of sort...my sprinkler system. I haven't used it since I took my Permaculture Design Course years ago, but it's still there, and it still works. And, it has *timed* valves! And it was at that point that I realized there were entire *systems* of electrically controlled watering hardware sitting down at Home Depot just *waiting* to become part of some crazy permie chicken-watering project!
For the time being, I think I'm simply going to re-route the least-important valve on the sprinkler system as the input to the chicken waterer, and use a stand-alone timer on the output, since I don't really want to hack up the existing system *too* much. At that point the waterer will be re-filled once day automatically, and periodically drained. Not only will this prevent new mosquitoes from being produced in my yard, but it will *also* cause existing ones to waste their precious eggs into a system from which they will never return!
