The revolutionary pet water system

This is for the pet rabbit. About $3. It's a 1-1/4" PVC slip joint p-trap - the J shaped tube. The other part is a hose clamp. I just clamp the J to a PVC pipe glued to the "cage". And of course the "free" standard wine bottle.

It works as any office gravity feed drinking water system or any pet gravity feed system. Rabbits like to topple things. Mounting the J instead of a heavy bowl saves space, and the rabbit cannot step into the bowl. I used bottles with a stem and ball valve. It drips eventually. The mounting on the outside of the wire door is stupid for an outdoor cage, which can be rather cold without covering it up in winter. Mounting inside is still very inconvenient. I tried to make something to mount it but the awkward stem made anything fail eventually.

It happened that a standard wine bottle neck can get into the 1-1/4" slip joint, but cannot pass through the joint. So the water level is perfectly aligned as shown. The bottle can wobble a bit but it's not going to fall off. The only minor detail is that the bottle opening fits the joint too well, sometimes making a perfect seal. To avoid that, I put a plastic soft mesh, such as those used in gardening to protect from birds, on top of the J, before slipping the bottle in. The soft mesh guarantee to disrupt any perfect seals.

Kids know how to add water. But in order not to spill a drop, you need a hand pump for babies, pump out the remaining from the drinking hole, before taking out the bottle.

Sure mr rabbit knows where the water is. He drinks it too. But I'm not sure. For the water bottle with a drinking stem, he learned to drink it in no time. Since the water is flowing slowing, you can watch drinking from it. Maybe he drinks a lot faster from the J, so I don't notice that he drinks from it. I marked the water level in the bottle just to make sure. And he still pees a lot. I'm not sure because rabbits' mouth are a bit clumsy, opening like under the chin. So he has to dip his whole chin into the water to drink from it, unlike dogs and cats.

For dogs it's easier. I brought a float valve from Ace's hardware for cattle. It's like a brick but made of foam for the float. I just mount it on a bucket, large enough that he cannot topple the weight full of water. Water in the bucket is constant when connected to a garden hose. I can go for a few days of holiday and not worry about the water. Food is different.

The only problem is that you need a backyard. It's totally not for indoors. And you need some shelter to reduce the dust, soil, leaves and branches from falling into the bucket.

The requirements. You need a bowl big enough so that your pet cannot topple it deliberately or accidentally. The alternative is to mount it somewhere fixed.

You want to reduce the drinking hole to reduce dirt, not for your pet to step in it or dip their heads into it. But you want it to be big enough so they can find it and drink from it without training.

Water level should be high to reduce dirt, like rabbit litter. But you don't want to keep a large volume of water. It's easier to go stale. It's not as convenient to cleanup the whole setup. You want the water level to be low at a comfortable level for your pets.

You don't want to refill water every day, but you want to save space for your pets.

Kids should be able to refill without mess.

The 1 1/2 P-trap should be large enough for big dogs, if only for vacation. Either you get those huge wine bottles, or you can adapt the 1-1/2 slip holding a standard bottle, to the 1-1/2 standard non slip joint tubes. I can see that you can put a bottle and a J at different places for redundancy when you are at vacation.

ps The wine bottle necks seem to be fairly standard. I use a much smaller bottle now with the same size neck so the kids can do it easily. Water need to be changed every 2 days instead of about a week. The lighter load means that there's less tilting of the bottle - basically it's mounted on a PVC pipe glued onto a acrylic platform. The weight of a full wine bottle will bend the whole thing slightly to one side.