As long as the plumber was out digging up our yard to repair the sewer pipe, I asked him to make the faucet (‘hose bib’, he called it) functional. And now it is. But Winter is coming. I’m pretty sure he didn’t insulate the pipe that goes to it. (I’m also pretty sure the piping was already there, as it only took him about 15 minutes to get the (new) hose bib working.) I really don’t want any split pipes. We have a roll of foil-backed fibreglass insulation without the packaging. Apparently, one is to wrap this stuff in a spiral around pipes. We have some zip-ties to secure it.
Q: Should this be sufficient to keep pipes from freezing in temperatures that can get down into the 20s and teens?
I would doubt it. I think you either need electric heat tape or you need to shut the water off internally in the house and drain the pipe to the faucet if the temperatures at the faucet are getting that low [I am not at all clear exactly what you have].
Almost certainly not unless you have a lot of heat from the house leaking out there. If there is an internal shut off valve, shut it off and open the outside bib so the water drains.
As the pipe was already there and wasn’t cracked, I assume there was no water in it last winter, so there must have been some way to shut the water off to that pipe without shutting your water off completely.
The only shut-off valve I know of is at the street, and it shuts off water to the whole house. Other pipes under the house are insulated, but the hot water pipe to the utility sink tends to freeze. Not sure why that would be, since we have hot water and cold water to other places in the house, so I don’t think there’s a problem with the pipe feeding the water heater.
I’ll have to look to see if I can find a valve for the recently-reactivated pipe.
That’s insane! You need a better plumber.
My house there’s a; whole house shutoff in the basement, one on the toilet, hot & cold on every sink and the washing machine.
We need a less expensive one, that’s for sure. But the valve isn’t the plumber’s doing. The house was built as a holiday cabin in 1934, and there’s no telling when it got running water.
Yeah - as others have said, get a shut off valve installed.
I assume the house has a crawl space that the pipes are in? How well is the floor insulated?
If you follow the copper back from the hose bib you should find a valve at some point. Closing it, and draining the water between the valve and hose bib is what you need to do. Some valves have a little nub you can unscrew to drain the copper between the valve and the hose bib.
Is the house heated to ANY extent through the winter, or do you just shut everything off? Because if you keep it at 50 or so, you could probably wrap insulation around the pipe in a way that the heat rom the floor keeps the pipe above freezing. But the safest route is to drain the pipes and shut off the water.
We live here year-round, so the house is heated. We have an oil-filled radiator-style heater in the back bedroom next to the wall by the utility sink (on the other side of the wall) to keep the pipes in the wall warm.
I’ll have another cuppa joe, and then go out to investigate.
I didn’t see a valve, but I did notice that the pipe is neither galvanised nor copper. It’s Pex. I’m guessing the plumber spliced it in when the water was turned off at the street. Everything else under the house is insulated with black, split, foam tubes – except for one galvanised pipe coming out of the ground. I’ll go to the hardware store and get some of the split-tube insulation.
If it’s pex, it is trivially easy to splice in a dedicated valve on that line. For a one-off addition like this, I’d recommend the Shark Bite fittings. You can get a valve with the appropriate connectors and pop it in there. You’ll need a pex cutter and the little horseshoe shaped tool for releasing the Shark Bite fittings just in case you need to adjust something after you make the connections.
Also, there is a foam sort of cap that you can attach to the hose bib itself to help hold in a bit of the house heat rather than conducting it away.
FWIW, we had well water at our old house down south (not the least of reasons we are apartment dwellers now). We needed a repair to a pipe connected to the pipe to the house that was below the frost line, but it was going to require us to be outside, and to dig into the ground when it was frozen. And, we had a baby.
We also had a weirdly placed well that was not directly under the house, but about 15 feet behind it. Don’t ask.
So we decided to buy some pipe, run it from the tank into the house, connect it to the main line, disconnecting the one that needed repair, wrap a bunch of heating tape over it, and let all the taps drip until spring.
It worked.
The extra pipe and heater tape cost less than $100, and installing everything took less than an hour (baby napped).
Just letting you know that the stuff works, albeit it, for emphasis, it was the electric tape you plug in, not just the insulating tape.
If for some reason you can’t shut off and drain the pipe, which would be my first idea as well.
I insulated everything (new pipe, galvanised pipe, and a length of previously-uninsulated Pex) with the same split-tube insulation that was on the other pipes.
Question for OP? Did the plumber not install a self-draining hose bib? Those things are safely freeze proof as long as you don’t leave a hose on in freezing weather.
From your link, the hose bib has an anti-siphon valve. I assume it’s supposed to be loose? There’s a foam faucet insulator over it (the whole thing), and the hose is put away until late-Spring.