Cleaning Water Bowls?

algae is always going to grow in water buckets but the vinegar solution sounds like your safest route to take, i use bleach to kill it off when i scrub the buckets after some time but although ive never done it personally, i know several people who add only a cap-full of bleach into their buckets along with the actual drinking water, and their dogs seem just fine but i don't think it delays algae growth by drastic amounts of time. What will speed up the growing process of algae is photosynthesis and this process cannot be completed without sunlight. So try to keep your water buckets out of direct sunlight and if you're using light colored buckets, e.g. yellow or white, try spray painting them black to stop the sun from penetrating from all other angles and have the exposed top in a well shaded area and that alone will slow down the algae buildup. Combining the shading and darkening of the container method along with the few tablespoons of vinegar method would probably be your safest and easiest way of postponing the scrubbing task as long as possible. On the farm, we thickly paint all of our water trailers and chemical mixing stations with several coats of black paint annually and it has proven itself successful. We had 3 clear 500 gallon plastic water containers on trailers and several plastic yellow "Cess-pool" looking water storage tanks that hold thousands of gallons of water and before we painted them, even with the lids on and sealed off, they would still grow algae like crazy and it was always a chore to clean out. It would even grow in the tanks we'd mixed round-up in before! Finally, a guy from Helena (a chemical/farm store) told us to paint them with several coats of black paint and sure enough, it stopped it completely and we could store water in them year-round w/o any algae growth what so ever. It only stopped it "completely" in these cases because the containers all had lids and were semi air-tight but i still applied the same trick at home on my white and yellow 5-gallon buckets and keep them well shaded and i generally have to clean them out because of dirt and grime from the dogs sticking their feet into them well before i ever have to scrub them out due to algae buildup. So in a nutshell: Use dark colored or black painted containers, keep them out of as much sunlight as possible, and surely by adding a little vinegar to the mix, this will slow down the green gunk a significant amount and leave you with more free time to shovel SH*T out of your kennels. A little Botany Lecture 101, haha!! Good luck fellas' -Lawdawg