Forgot to Winterize Your Outside Faucet(s)? Here’s what to do. 2014

Did you forget to winterize your outside faucets this year?  I did.  It doesn’t matter that I posted a Fall Maintenance Checklist reminding homeowners to shut off water to their outside faucets nearly two months ago… I still forgot.

It’s not the end of the world.  In most cases, there’s enough heat leaking out of your home to prevent your outside faucet from being destroyed and your water pipe from bursting.

Use a hair dryer or a heat gun to thaw your faucet.   This will take a long time with a hair dryer, but it’ll happen eventually.  If you choose to use a heat gun, be very careful.  That’s not a high-powered hair dryer, it’s a heat gun.  It’ll blister paint, melt vinyl siding, and start paper on fire.  The two infrared images below show a heat gun on the left and a hair dryer on the right; note the temperatures shown at the top left corners of images.

So anyways, use one of these tools to thaw the faucet.  You’ll know the faucet has thawed once you can turn the faucet handle to open it.  If there is ice inside the pipe and faucet, you’ll first get a little trickle of water coming out, but the water coming through should quickly break the ice loose and you’ll soon get a normal stream of water coming out of the faucet.

Once that happens, you can winterize your faucet as normal.  Click here for instructions: How to winterize outside faucets

Author: Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections