Keeping taps unfrozen overnight.

kerilli

kerilli

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Just in case anyone hasn't cottoned on to this yet, i posted about it last winter but it's prob been forgotten!
if your tap is fitted high enough, put a clean empty dustbin under it, and leave the tap on a very slight trickle or slow drip overnight. my yard tap's in a very exposed area but unless it gets to -6 or below, the trickle of water prevents it from freezing, and there's a full bin of nice fresh water to use in the morning...
 
We have our tap with a wooden box fitted around it. All we do is pour a kettle off hot water in the box and within a minute we have water again. The steam does the job for us. We are on water tanks so wouldn't leave a tap running even if only a bit.
 
good idea :D I was caught out once when the cold hit, but since then have wrapped a thick fleece around the tap (the pipe is already insulated) and it has prevented it from freezing.:D
 
I don't have room under my tap to do this - do you not have panic attacks about it overflowing onto the yard over night? I would most definitely be having nightmares about that! :)

I use my old faithful of 2 towels wrapped around the pipe, and 2 towels wrapped around the actual tap, and then cover the whole lot in a horsehage bag. So far it has worked just fine - although I do not do waters in the morning anymore - I do all the waters in the evening.

I also keep a full kettle and a full 8 litre water urn ready to boil in case of freezing emergencies!
:)
 
We use a bale of straw lent up again the pipe and tab, used to have a wooden box fitted around it until someone elses cob rubbed it's big fat backside on it and broke it :rolleyes:, YO never got round to fixing it again.
 
I have given up trying and am just nicking water from the cows troughs which are still running and full of fresh clean water, Little bits of straw in them from the straw chopper they use oin the farm to bed them down but better than nothing!! and the horses seem to be drinking it.
 
My yard does this too - infact they have removed the 'turny' bit from the tap so that no one can switch it back off! Takes a bit longer for your buckets to fill right enough ;)
 
We do this, fab idea, depending on if the barrel is full we run a hosepipe from the tap and down a drain so it constantly on trickle and dont have to worry about anything overflowing :)
 
We have lagged our pipes and covered the tap with a wooden casing- works in normal freezing weather but has frozen when its beeen down to minus 6!
 
My late father was a plumber and taught me to do the dripping tap trick as well, bless him.

You can do it inside the house as well - its not a big "drip" that's needed, just a very slight, intermittent one, and it will save you getting a burst pipe and all the expense and inconvenience of that.

Its just a matter of keeping the water moving around in the pipes which will stop it freezing, plus of course having your loft & pipes up there lagged.

IF you do get a freeze, do not leave it!!! Bad news if you do coz it will only get worse. The best thing to unfreeze a pipe is an electric hairdryer on it, OR even better one of those clothes airer things which you can just put on the pipe and it should unthaw in say an hour or so from the gradual heat. OR you can put a hotwater bottle in a duvet and put that up on the pipe.

Its a good idea to have a mosey around in your loft and get to know which pipes go where, so that if you do get one frozen, you've got a good idea of which water pipe feeds in from the loft, rather than have to panic in an emergency situation and find out what pipe goes where! Much better to do it with plenty of time and a cool head (plus a good torch!).

We don't have central heating in my house, but in the cold snap this January, and now, we've not had a pipe freeze up; whereas another house that we rent out to tenants did have a burst pipe, and its cost a fortune. Although the insurance paid out most of it, there's still the excess, which has gone up to £250 this year, plus the property had to be vacant for four months to dry out properly. We told the tenants what to do to avoid a leak and they just didn't blimmin' bother, and so the pipes froze. We'd lived in that house for forty years and not had a single pipe freeze, and they let it happen! Grrrrhhhh.
 
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