Wildlife guzzler

Hello everyone, I am very recently retired and now have too much time on my hands, I own 34 acres north of Bracketville and thinking about building a guzzler,. Anyone had any experience with this?

There have been several threads in the past on this. Here are few I found searching back over the past 5 yrs. There have been many more about building some type of a watering system also that you can use the search feature on here to locate them.
https://texashuntingforum.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/7560435
https://texashuntingforum.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/7272031
https://texashuntingforum.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/7156786
https://texashuntingforum.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/6798454
https://texashuntingforum.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/6390659
You are going to be dealing with lower annual rainfall averages and higher heat year round that will effect how much water you can store. You might consider building a shed or shelter roof that you can gutter and store water in a larger storage tank. That way you will loose less to evaporation. Then pipe it to a smaller capacity trough.

I intend to build a small shed over a 275 gallon water tote and run pipe to two water tanks,just got to figure out how to make it hog proof

You can hog proof the trough with a 4"x4" piece of cattle panel over the top. For it to work you must keep the water level at 4" below the panel or closer. Just have to get the right kind of float...the plastic Little Giant is what I used since it was garden hose threads. I did this on a house trough that was round concrete trough. Hogs were tearing up the float so I cut a piece of 4"x4" piece of cattle panel to fit over the top of the trough. I took some 12 gauge tie wire and tied a piece around the trough about 6" down from the top. I tied the panel to that piece of wire to keep the panel on top. I did not think it would work as good as it did, but it did work very well. I watched the narrow nose of a deer be able to reach the water and drink all they wanted. The hogs finally gave up after a couple of weeks and never even tried anymore. I had 25-30 hd of cattle get out of the neighbors and try to drink out of the trough thru the panel. They could only lick at the water but finally gave up and left back home. A feed pen around the trough will help but it will limit fawns from getting to water(need sheep and goat height trough or shorter). I read somewhere that a 28" height feed pen can keep the almost all the hogs out of feeder or water source. The key with hogs to not let them find it first before you get it built correctly. Build it big enough to let the animals in easily. Look at how many square feet of roof space you have and then do the math to see how many gallons of water it will collect with every inch rain. Build it big enough and then you could plumb 2 or more totes together since 275 gallons will go quickly with animals and evaporation. You get a big rain and you will be glad you had a lot of storage. An average size deer can drink about a gallon of water per day. Bucks are larger so they drink a bit more. So 10 deer can empty it in a month or less with evaporation added in also. Keep the trough as small as you can and it will work better. Right now my evaporation rate is 3/4 to 1" per day in a small pond on my place. Place some rocks or limb or something in the trough for critters that fall into so than can get out. If you can dig the trough down a few inches it will be better also.

https://mcallenranch.net/wildlife/

Welcome sir

Thanks stxranchman I'm going to try the panel , soon I'll have deer everywhere LOL. This is the best forum I've ever been on

Jimbo how big is that water trough

The picture Jimbo posted is how I was taught way back in the '70s in one of my wildlife classes at A&M.

I used to hunt up near Montell and Camp Wood. One morning hunting was real slow and my buddy and I decided to just run some back roads to see what we could see.
We ended up down in Bracketville. As we were rolling through town we saw a big doe trotting down the street a couple blocks over not a care in the world. We had a good laugh as she paralleled us most of the way through town.

I honestly couldn't tell you.
Using the dementions of that 4" overflow pvc and the 2x6 board as a reference, you could figure pretty close the measurements of the trough. The overflow pipe directs the water away preventing the trough from overflowing and creating a lake under and around it which the hogs would soon turn into a wallow.
That picture was taken on an old lease I was on in LaSalle county in 2007. What I do remember is there seemed to be a rattler under every bush.