[Bramblecot]

We have troughs fed only by the rainwater gutters on the barn and field shelters.    no problems as yet except not enough water in summer.  We clean them out a few times a year.  We fill a couple of lick buckets with water for the lambs to use.  Our sheep are often at the troughs drinking and the lambs catch on pretty quickly too.  We have a couple of breeze blocks at one end and the sheep prefer to stand on them to reach the trough

[mowhaugh]

All of our water works on a slightly more souped up version of this.  We do have to remove frogs and debris from the filters we've got on, and I boil the water my children are drinking, but it seems to work OK.  We do run dry at times, I keep a supply of Sainsbury's Value bottles in the house all the time and we have a license from SEPA to pump water out of the river if we need to, but in general it's pretty good.  The fish sound like a plan!

I would have thought it would be quite straightforward to put a pipe on the tap of one of those big containers and pipe it into an old lick tub with a ballcock on so you weren't worrying about filling the tubs really often in hot weather.

I've never thought about it until Bramblecot mentioned it, but our sheep definitely prefer to drink with their front feet up on something too, no idea why!

[JulieWall]

There is no piped water supply to my main sheep field and it is a real pain lugging buckets to it from the house - especially around lambing when they get dry cake and hay and their consumption of water rockets. I am thinking of collecting rainwater from the roof of the field shelter into one of those giant fruit juice containers within a metal cage and using that to replenish the troughs. I would cover it in black polythene to keep out the light to reduce algae growth. I guess it would need to be filtered to removed the big contaminants, but what else can be done to improve is quality? Does anybody else do this kind if thing?
They  have access to a small stream that runs along one edge of the field,  but of course being sheep that would be too easy and I have never seen them drink from it. Thanks.

We do this on the chicken house and rabbit shed, mostly for filling the duck pond and watering the polytunnel, it works well. The only thing I'd suggest is to be absolutely sure that the container didn't originally have anything toxic inside it, those IBC tanks are used for allsorts of fluids, not just fruit juice.
I think I'd be wondering about that stream  why won't the sheep drink the water, it should be ideal. Is there something being discharged into it further upstream that they don't like the smell of? My sheep leave any patch of grass that has had a dog poo on it even if I collected the poo. Is there a chance that slurry or septic tank issue is contaminating the water?

[JulieWall]

Except at lambing, I rarely see my sheep drink 

Interesting - mine seem to drink loads more at lambing than at any other time and I am always re-filling water buckets for them then.

That's what I mean - ewes just lambed like a good drink, but other than that I rarely see them at the water troughs.

Manually filling containers for a small flock makes you very aware just how much they do drink. They drink loads when on dry food and hay, loads just before lambing (good indicator, by the way) and loads whilst lactating. They also drink in hot weather no matter how lush the grass is.

[suziequeue]

Blimey!! I had never thought about it. All our sheep have rainwater only. I've never given it a thought and we've had them four or five years now with no unexplained losses

[shotblastuk]

This may be an old wives tale but I didn't think sheep will drink from running water. Ours won't and a stream runs right through the fields they're in, we fill up troughs from the stream water and they drink it!!

[waterbuffalofarmer]

We collect rainwater for our sheep and pigs and they seem fine. Mind you it must be clean though.

[shep53]

This may be an old wives tale but I didn't think sheep will drink from running water. Ours won't and a stream runs right through the fields they're in, we fill up troughs from the stream water and they drink it!!

         NO mains water here all sheep and cattle drink from burns , also house water is just burn water into a collection tank no uv or filters

[suziequeue]

In our bottom field they only have the stream. We never put a trough in when they are there. I had always assumed that they drank from the stream. None of them have died of dehydration. 

[shep53]

Some sheep sheds have a simple watering system , you run plastic sewage pipes down the shed and cut half the diameter out about a foot wide for each pen ,    a water pipe laid in the burn upstream, water in to the sewage pipe and another pipe at the far end to take the constantly running water back to the burn