Automatic waterers: energy-free vs electric, and whether a small place needs one

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Research. We have not installed one. What follows is how the two types work, the rating that decides whether either suits a small place, and what the install costs on top of the unit. When there is one in the ground here and it has been through a season, this page gets updated with the date.

The waterer is the cheapest part of an automatic waterer.

The two kinds

Energy-free. A heavily insulated box. Animals push a ball or a flap to reach the water. No element, no cord. It stays open because the supply line and a wide riser come up from ground that never freezes, and because animals keep drawing that warmer water up.

Electric. A small heated bowl with an element and a thermostat, often a heated valve housing too. Far lower wattage than a stock tank heater — small volume, insulated box — but it needs a circuit at the paddock.

A third option nobody sells as a waterer: a buried line, a frost-free hydrant, a tank and a float valve. Cheapest, most repairable, and it freezes.

The number nobody prints on the box

Energy-free units are rated by head count, and the rating has a floor as well as a ceiling. Published minimums commonly land around ten to fifteen head of cattle per drinking hole.

That floor is not marketing. The design depends on animals drinking often enough to turn the water over and pull ground heat up the riser. Below it the water sits still, and still water in an insulated box freezes.

With four head in a Tennessee January, an energy-free waterer is an insulated box with ice in it. It is the clearest case in this category of equipment that does not scale down.

The trench is the purchase

Energy-free units do not care about your frost depth. They care about reaching stable ground temperature, which is deeper — generally several feet, past the foot or so you would plan for a hydrant.

Price the whole stack before the unit: the trench, by the hour on a rented mini-ex or by the foot from a contractor; pipe and fittings; a frost-free hydrant in the run so you have water without the waterer; a concrete pad, which many units need and which must cure before the cold; a gravel drain if the design calls for one; conduit and power for the electric versions.

On a small place that stack routinely exceeds the unit. Lay conduit while the trench is open even if you buy energy-free — the second trench is the expensive one. The charger page makes the same case from the other side: run the utility out to the paddock once.

Where the cheap ones fail

At the float valve, nearly always. A plastic seat gives up sooner than brass and a diaphragm hardens after a couple of years, but the common one is grit: debris from a new line cuts the seat on the first fill and it weeps from then on. Flush the supply before you connect the valve.

Then ask what the listing will not tell you: can you get the valve out? Some units bury it behind a housing that has to come apart in the cold, on your knees, with the water off.

What it stops telling you

A tank you fill tells you how much they drank. An automatic waterer tells you nothing — it looks the same whether stock are drinking normally or one has not been near it in two days. With a few head you genuinely can notice, so put a hand in it daily, or fit an inline meter on the supply.

Whether it beats hauling

Cattle drink on the order of ten to twenty gallons a head a day in warm weather. Six head is up to 120 gallons, a 100-gallon tank filled more than once. Water is 8.3 lb a gallon, so 100 gallons in the truck bed is 830 lb. Call it twenty to thirty minutes a day, worst in the weather that makes it matter.

For a small outfit the answer is an order of operations, not a product choice:

1. Get water to the paddock — line and a frost-free hydrant. That is the expensive step, and worth doing whatever you decide next. 2. Run a tank on a float valve for a season. Cheap, repairable, and it teaches you your real daily consumption. 3. Buy the waterer then, if you still want it, sized on a number you know.

Buying the unit first means paying for the trench anyway and guessing at the sizing.

What we are doing

Nothing is in the ground here and no trench has been dug. The type is not the open part: a place this size will not hold the ten to fifteen head per drinking hole an energy-free unit wants, and under that floor the thing is an insulated box with ice in it. What is open is how far up the order above we go once there is stock to water — haul it, run a tank on a float valve off a hydrant, or put a waterer at the end of that. The line and the hydrant are worth paying for whichever way it lands, and the consumption figure that would size a unit does not exist until a tank has been run a season.

So this section fills in by stages. The trench, the pipe, the hydrant and the pad go here with what they came to, costed separately from any unit, along with the head count and the layout at the time we decided. The tag at the top is not on that schedule. It stops saying Research when there is a waterer in the ground here and it has been through a season, which is a long way after the digging, and may not come at all.

Before you buy

• Check the manufacturer's minimum head count first. Under it, energy-free is out.
• Price the trench, pipe, hydrant, pad and power before the unit. Better to be stopped by that total now.
• Whatever goes in, put a shutoff and a drain upstream of it, within reach of the tank.

— Chris D., McEwen, Tennessee