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Bottomless Tank

H

harris25

Member
Joined
Mar 23, 2009
Messages
18
Location
harrisburg, nebraska
Have some bottomless tanks that the cows and calves think they need to get in and rub on the overflow pipes and break them off. For a temporary fix have placed panels around the pipes to keep them from draining the tank. Looking for a place to buy a 4-6" flanged pipe that we can bolt into the concrete to hopefully keep the cows off. Any ideas out there?
 
We had the same problem on some ground my dad just bought. We took some inch and a half square tube i think it was 11 ga. and put an upright about every 4 foot. Put a bolt in the very top rib through the tank and the square, and tack welded on the ribs all the way to the bottom. My dad is a great stick welder, I would just burn a hole in the tank. Anyway we welded a cross piece of inch and a quarter square on those all the way around the tank. I know it dosn't sound very heavy duty but square tube is strong. Bulls haven't bent it up. Only took a couple hours to do. They have to stick their head under the bar to get a drink, kind of like a bale feeder. I can try to take some pictures of it on Monday to put on here.
 
Would work, but would cost about 20 times as much and cattle could still get their front feet in unless you use 5 foot long panels. I guess it depends on what type of equipment you have and access to what materials. We keep a lot of steel on hand so this was a simple fix.
 
Seems to help if we keep the tanks banked up good with not much of the tank showing and the cattle will not step down into the water. Maybe our cattle are trained but seems to do the trick.
 
We were having the same problem and I took four posts, some hot wire and a solar powered fencer and put up a single strand around the tank. I gave them four small areas of the tank to drink from and it never seemed to cause a problem with cows being thirsty. If you ground the fencer to the tank it doesn't take long for them to quit trying to climb in. It doesn't take much of a fencer to fix the problem.
 
Someone else told me that. Thats what they must have been thinking when they built this tank it's not very high out of the ground on the outside. We had replacement heifers and bulls in there. The first day it got to 90 you couldn't get another animal in the tank it was plumb full of critters. I guess when the first one got in everybody else thought it was polite to do the same.
 
rancherfred said:
We were having the same problem and I took four posts, some hot wire and a solar powered fencer and put up a single strand around the tank. I gave them four small areas of the tank to drink from and it never seemed to cause a problem with cows being thirsty. If you ground the fencer to the tank it doesn't take long for them to quit trying to climb in. It doesn't take much of a fencer to fix the problem.
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Do young critters ever balk at getting a drink after being zapped? I don't dought that works either, but I bet your fencer cost quite a bit more than the little bit of iron we used.
 
The suggestions for panels works pretty good as well. If you take two or three wire hog or cattle panels and wire the ends together to make a circle inside the tank about two feet smaller than the tank all the way around. They have a hard time climbing in. The wire panels don't need to be in real good shape. If you want to give it a try I have some panels that you could use to try it. They are kind of bent up but they would work.
 
Big tanks like the one pictured, out in this country have 3 inch pipe cemented in like the tubing ya'll bolted on. Then we run 2 cables around, one at the top and one 16 inches above the tank and it works pretty good. If i think of it, i will take a picture next time i am on the mountain.
 
leanin' H said:
Big tanks like the one pictured, out in this country have 3 inch pipe cemented in like the tubing ya'll bolted on. Then we run 2 cables around, one at the top and one 16 inches above the tank and it works pretty good. If i think of it, i will take a picture next time i am on the mountain.
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I like the pipe in the concrete with the cable idea. At least with the cable if you had some kind of wreck you could undo it to get something out of the tank easier. Whoever put this tank in must have never had cattle get in one before. Or they would have done something like the pipe in the concrete.
 

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