But, I've been thinking about the constant feeding and watering that needs to be done. We are looking into creating an auto feeder and auto water using 4" or 3" (diameter) PVC pipe. One can only purchase a 10-foot length of PVC pipe from the home improvement outlets, so I want to choose the right size and divide that in half for two 4 to 5 foot lengths. We are looking for a way to feed and water both in the coop and the run at the same time since the run is directly under the coop. But first we needed to know how much water a 3" and a 4" diameter pipe could hold. The way to figure that out is to get the number of cubic inches per 12-inch long section of pipe would hold. There are 231 cubic inches per gallon. Pi * radius" * radius" * 12" = cubic inches. 4" pipe would be 3.1416 * 2 * 2 * 12 = 150.8 ci while 3" pipe would be 3.1416 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 12 = 84.82 ci. The ci divided by 231 ( 150.8 / 231 = .66 gal or 84.82 / 231 = .37 gal). Nutshell is that a 3" diameter pipe will not provide nearly as much water as a 4" diameter pipe will provide. A 5-foot section of 3" diameter would be approximately 1.85 gallons while a 5-foot section of 4" would provide approximately 3.3 gallons! That's a big difference. (via Math Central)
I've been trying to research how much water to supply for "each" chicken. Based on a variety of sites, each chicken (standard adult) will drink at least a pint of water per day (on average) and with four chickens, that would be about a half gallon per day up to gallon plus in the summer time. On the other hand, with all the food and water inside of the coop/run tractor, that means that much more weight that will need to be moved per day. A gallon of water weighs almost 10 pounds per gallon, so that would be about 30 extra pounds for water and about 15 to 20 pounds for the food. Plus, if we incorporate the two layers for the feeder and the water... that means that we will need to keep both nearly full every day.
Is your head spinning yet? That's how I felt after looking at all the numbers. I'm just saying that I never really realized that math comes into play when caring for a few chickens.
