I've had a love/hate relationship with the goat water buckets for a long time. I loved how quick they were to fill and that I could raise and lower their height by hanging them on the fence. And using buckets made it easy to adjust how much water we used in relationship to how many goats were in the pen. But the disadvantages were starting to bug me more. The bucks would bump their buckets causing them to spill out the top third of the water. And although cleaning them was easy, the only way to really get rid of the algae buildup was to use some bleach and that caused the plastic to break down from the scrubbing. **I will add, for anyone thinking of using buckets, that rotating to a clean bucket and hanging the used one to dry EVERY DAY, prevented a lot of the algae to begin with. But it began to feel wasteful and time consuming to keep that up.** So about 2 months ago we decided to experiment with water troughs.
Since our herd is so small, we went with 2 small black rubber troughs. They hold about a week's worth of water at a time. I've been checking for cleanliness and making sure they hold a cool temperature daily. Every couple days I add a little water to top it off and once a week I dump and scrub the algae out. I haven't used any bleach yet but I also haven't been able to get all of the buildup removed. ARGH!
I remembered reading sometime ago, before I even had goats, that some people use goldfish in their water tanks to remove algae and mosquito larvae. I decided to give that a try and this week when we were at a WalMart that has a fish section in their pet department, I picked a few up. We got them installed in their new home a couple days ago. Now we will watch and see how they do!
Do you have experience with using fish in your livestock tanks? I'd love to hear about it in the comment section below!
