Think in buckets, not ponds
Ducks stay healthy without a pond as long as their water system is designed around what ducks actually do to water: they dabble, dunk, splash and rinse food in it, and any container is filthy within hours. What they physiologically need is water deep enough to submerge the whole head — that is how they keep eyes and nostrils clean — plus, for their happiness, something bath-sized when you can manage it. A workable no-pond setup uses two tiers: sturdy buckets or trugs for drinking and head-dunking, changed daily, and a small rigid paddling pool or low stock tank for bathing, refreshed every few days rather than daily.
Site the water so the splash goes somewhere
The difference between a tidy duck run and a swamp is drainage. Set the drinking buckets on a patch of gravel, a grid of mesh over a shallow pit, or slabs with gaps, so the constant splashing soaks away instead of churning the run into mud the ducks then stir back into their water. Move the bucket station a few feet every so often and rest the old patch. Keep feed well away from the water station: ducks ferry mouthfuls of pellets to the water to rinse them, and the shorter that journey, the less food gets dropped and soured along the way. Position water in shade in summer to slow the green algae that film a sunlit bucket.
The change-and-scrub rhythm
Fresh buckets daily is the baseline, with a real scrub — stiff brush, every surface, including the rim ducks wipe their bills on — at least twice a week, and more often in hot weather when algae film a bucket within days. Tip the old water onto ground that needs it, never back into the run, and let buckets dry in the sun between fills when you have spares, because sunlight and drying are honest disinfectants. The bathing pool runs on a looser cycle: dump, scrub and refill when the water goes opaque rather than merely murky, typically every two to four days for a small flock, sooner if it smells. A bucket fouled overnight is no crisis; water left fouled for days, with ducks dunking in soup, is where eye and sinus infections begin.
Keeping it going when you're not there
The system fails on human absence, not duck behaviour: a weekend away without a water plan leaves buckets dry or undrinkable. Larger reservoirs and gravity drinkers can bridge a day or so, but dunking depth and daily freshness mean ducks genuinely need a daily human visit, so arrange a duck-sitter rather than extra hardware. Write the sitter's version of the routine down — which buckets, where the scrub brush lives, what the pool's cycle is — and the water stays as clean in your absence as in your presence. That written routine is easy to keep current in KinsLe's Care Teams, where the daily bucket change and the twice-weekly scrub sit as assigned duties for whoever is on duck duty, each ticked off with a timestamp so a missed day is obvious at a glance.