Re-insulating the inlet
We've had such a mild
autumn that we're still burning last year's firewood. In fact, we
haven't even split any firewood yet --- we're still working through the
stockpiled bounty we stacked on the back porch while cleaning out the
shed last spring.
But the weather abruptly
shifted at the beginning of this week. A low of 16 means frozen ground,
a skim of ice on pools in the creek...and waking up to a waterline
frozen where it enters the house.
In large part, I think
the problem is that I didn't ever get around to unhooking the outside
hose and closing that access
hatch. But Mark went ahead and added more insulation to our inlet
anyway. Luckily, our freezes don't tend to burst the line, they just
mean we have to wait until the sun hits before we enjoy running water
once again. A small price to pay for our isolation out here far from
any city water system.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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When we lived at our country house, many of our neighbours used the nearby freshwater lakes as their water supply. They used heat cables to prevent the lines from freezing during the winter, with temperatures frequently falling below -30C.
http://www.heatingelementsplus.com/heat-trace-cable.html
Thanks for the suggestions but we have been using heat tape on those pipes when they come out of the ground into the trailer for a few years now.
We also went through a round of using that heat tape to make a heated chicken waterer before I evolved to the modified heated horse water bucket.
http://www.avianaquamiser.com/tag/heated_chicken_waterer/
http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Funny_looking_snake/