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Drinking Post Automatic Waterers EASY Riser attachment?

Opinions on this product for a farm that experiences all four seasons including very cold, snowy winters?

DP has a lot of testimonials in Colorado. The winters there can be super harsh and long. They also have a testimonial from a farm in Saskatchewan Canada, where again, winters are long and harsh. I don’t have personal experience with DP, but I Ritchie Waterers instead. They always did well here in Michigan, where we get all4 seasons sometimes in the same day :wink:

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I looked at them a couple years ago and ended up with a BarBar-A instead. Why? Because a friend had a horse rub its butt on the Drinking Post and broke it. Not sturdy enough for me.

My only comment is definitely do automatic waterers. We were told it was a must and I cannot believe how profound it is to NOT have to deal with buckets etc. Truly the single most best decision in my build.

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I have one in eastern Ontario. We get very cold and snowy winters. I love mine; no issues with freezing, the horses seem to prefer it to the buckets in their stalls and will often ignore their fresh water in the stall to go out and drink from the post (it’s the same water source).

The only negatives I have found is that grazing muzzles don’t fit in them well. I use a green guard and I need to bring out an extra trough for that time… which then is an issue because she prefers the drinking post to all other sources so she won’t drink :woman_facepalming:t3:. My current issue is my new foal is not big enough to get the leverage needed to push the paddle. So I’ve got a water trough out now until he gets bigger.

If I was redoing my property I probably would still use the drinking post again though. It’s literally no maintenance and works consistently well. I just keep an extra paddle on hand because they do break on occasion.

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I was going to install one and I contacted someone who is a local dealer to get on their spring list (I contacted them in the fall).

I live in North Dakota. We did have a particularly bad winter, including a very bad blizzard. When I contacted said person in the spring, they were no longer going to be a dealer because of the extremely poor performance of the drinking post. She sent me pictures. It was a horrible ice mess - never seen anything like it. And…she told me that the manufacture was NOT being helpful. (the customer service aspect was what bothered her the most)

I currently have a smaller size Richie. I do get some ice around it when the wind is bad, simply b/c the wind will slosh the water over the edge, so I get it. But the Drinking Post? It doesn’t have water “setting” like that so I do not know how it would make such an ice mess.

I have another friend who loved hers. Said it did freeze up a few times and she would have to go out and dump HOT water on it to get it unfroze.

So I guess I am skeptical. If I need to do another water fountain, I’ll probably do the Richie because I have had zero problems with ours. The one benefit of the Drinking Post is you only need to dig water to it, whereas the Richie needs water AND electrical.

Look at Bar-Bar-A. I put one in a pasture where I don’t have electric and it has worked beautifully through our Wisconsin winters.

Drinking post users: do you use the Easy Riser attachment ? Or do you only use it to train a horse on it and then remove it? Or have you never used it even while training a horse to use it, and the horses still figure it out fine???

We had a DP installed about two months ago. One of my horses had never used an automatic waterer so I installed the Easy Riser for him. It definitely helped and he figured it out how to use it a couple days. I found my other horse was having problems getting a drink with the riser on so I removed it. Both use the waterer with no problems, they even choose it over a bucket of water.

I live in Colorado and we’ve already been down to 13 degrees in the morning. The paddle became a little stiff to push down on the first use in the morning. I followed DP’s recommendation on how to winterize the waterer by lubing the rod with vaseline. The video they provide on their website was very easy to follow and it fixed the problem. Wished I would have installed the waterer a long time ago.