Rusty watering Can

[rbruno]

Hello All,
Been a while since I was on the forum, but figured there was no better place to come back to with a question. I have a galvanized metal waterer for my chickens. For the past couple of years, I have switched back and forth between a plastic one for the summer and the metal one in the winter when I use a light bulb in a box to keep the water from freezing. The metal one is still solid and doesn't leak, but the inside has become pretty rusty. I hate to just throw it away because it still works just fine, but I don't like the amount of rust in the water after a few days. Has anyone ever painted the inside of a metal can to protect it and/or found paint that is not toxic or unhealthy for the chickens water? Just looking for any options besides just throwing a perfectly good waterer away and paying for another.
Thanks,
Rob

 

[nuthatched]

Just use it for plants instead of your chickens, I wouldn't use it for animal water.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Pre 70's most of our water pipes were iron and filled with rust. A little extra iron in the diet isn't going to harm the birds.

 

[nuthatched]

Pre 70's most of our water pipes were iron and filled with rust. A little extra iron in the diet isn't going to harm the birds.

Galvanized waterers aren't made of iron, but zinc treated steel.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Uh, there is no element in the periodic table called steel.

Saying that iron isn't in galvanized water can materials is profoundly ignorant; implying that there is no iron in steel would an order of magnitude more ignorant.

Since they appeared to be worried about the safety of the iron in the water (oh my, where did it come from) we should focus on iron content in our answers to the OP, not what specific form of iron. You wouldn't likely drink water with more than say 10 parts per million but as little as 0.3 parts per million of iron will turn the water red or brown, 33 times less. Some bacteria also eat the iron, leaving behind a slimy poop, for lack of a better word.

Fun fact, iron dissolved in water is clear, no reddish tint, but once exposed to the oxygen in the air the iron becomes oxidized, AKA, burned with the same heat output that fire would produce when oxidizing an element. Oxygen is a horrendous corrosive, you are living in a highly corrosive atmosphere, no different than a science fiction story of beings living in an acidic atmosphere or an alien that has blood that dissolves steel upon contact. Just a matter of how much.

Steel is 99.5 to 98% iron by weight in the most common forms with from a half of a percent to a couple of percent carbon content. There might be other elements like nickel and chromium, again in tiny quantities. Consider the weight of carbon, very lightweight, and iron, very heavy, shows you that the percentage by volume which is more important for this discussion means you can pretty much figure the carbon is way under a half of a percent by volume and 99.5% iron.

Carbon is an element but is of no real health concern.

If the carbon content is over 2% it is no longer steel but cast iron, no more than 4% carbon, small amounts of silicon, and odd element like sulfur. In this case those water buckets wouldn't be cast iron because cast iron is too brittle to work into thin sections, they are made of rolled steel coated with zinc usually in less than one ounce of zinc per square foot. But that is coated on two sides so figure a half ounce of zinc per square foot of material. Assuming a 26 gauge sheet metal, 12 ounces per square foot with one half ounce of that being zinc on each side so roughly 1/24th of the material is zinc on each side. Figure around .0017th of an inch or seventeen thousandths of an inch in thickness. Roughly half the thickness of a sheet of copy paper of zinc per side.


Zinc of course, like iron, is an essential element/mineral needed by most living things including chickens and humans.

TLTR: Do not worry about iron in water short of an artificial super saturated solution and even then the water would be stinky and likely unpleasant to drink but likely not hazardous. There are health risks including zinc depletion, but not at the levels these birds would intake.