I am building our second barn (yes, a test of the marriage) and I contemplate on a daily basis (as I am doing stalls in the first barn) of what to do with stall floors. I have in the first barn plastic grids in all and some with the grids covered by stall mats. A word about the grids - while they make the floor stable (no large holes except at one door where the horse pawed…a lot), they aren’t the end all for promoting drainage (stones and stone dust for the floor). So I am not buying the natural drainage concept. The mats are fine (new barn will have one 12x12 mat - no shifting, no heaving of interlocking mats), but I would love a concept where the floor was maybe slanted down hill to a drain along the interior wall. In Ireland I saw a barn which clearly took this concept to the limit - a concrete floor with a major slope down to the drain. The horses slept outside at night. There were no shavings.
Anyone have any brilliant ideas for what they would do? It is hard to have bedding and not clog up the drain and I am not sure how much positive slope you would need to actually make the urine travel to said drain.
I wouldn’t do the sloped drain. You have to clean out the entire stall every day with those. The urine runs and contaminates all the shavings, and the horses aren’t comfortable in it. Ask me how I know :lol:
However, something I have always wanted is a Drain under the water buckets so when they are dumped every morning, they just get dumped straight down. There would be spigots over each bucket too. I saw this configuration once and thought it was really neat. You might be able to put the stall on a very small slant towards the drain, but it would have to be just a tiny bit so the horses wouldn’t notice. Our wash stall is a 1 1/2 inch difference. It is enough to make the water go where it needs to but not enough that you can notice the difference.
Just put enough slant for water in case of flooding to not stand there.
For every day, any bedding will keep urine from flowing down sufficiently.
We had all concrete stalls every place in Europe, we bedded with straw, in later years shavings and sawdust and didn’t have rubber mats then.
Horses did fine, even standing and sleeping in those stalls, many on standing stalls, not box stalls.
Then, horses went out for lessons and trail rides several times a day also, how they got their exercise.
If I was building a barn for myself, I would go concrete with a minimal slope for larger amounts of water, like flooding or washing stalls out with hoses, today would maybe try thick mats over the concrete.
In reality, horses do best with two kinds of flooring, hard and smooth to stand on, concrete is fine and softer to lay down.
In concrete stalls, we had plenty of well bedded places to lay down and they could stand in the harder places for standing comfort.
I think you get into sore legs when the flooring is uneven and so a horse walks around constantly on uneven ground and stand there at all kinds of odd angles.
I LOVE my Stall Skins. Worth every penny. They drain beautifully. Crushed stone, sand and cover with the skins. After 7 years they have not shifted much at all. I bank my shavings during the day and pull down a nice bed at night (old race tracker here).
