What do you do to keep your pressure tank/well head from freezing?

[rus_geek]

...and how is it done up North.

Everything I've dealt with in central Wisconsin and Minnesota is quite far underground. For city supply lines, they branch off to enter the house four to ten feet underground, depending on how deep the mains are located and what other utilities are buried in the area. These branch lines typically enter through the floor of the basement, or low on a wall. The city's meter is in the basement of the home and read electronically.

For rural wells, they are mostly submersible pumps in the well casing (mine is 186' down). The water line branches out of the casing below the frost line. My line is about seven feet underground and brought in through the wall. My parents' well line comes in about six feet underground.

Pressure tanks and related electronics and plumbing are safe and warm in the basement of the house. There's nothing above ground outside to freeze. The only exception I've seen is for mobile homes. Those water lines come up under the trailer, are heavily insulated, and usually have a heat tape wrapped around with a thermostat.

-rus-

 

[passgas55]

Instead of a 220 volt bulb in a 120 socket you can do 2-100 watts 120 volt bulbs in series. That way you would drop 60 volts on each socket.

 

[JeremyL]

my friend has one with 3 lights we wired one on all the time 2 on a photo cell one is inside the dog house one outside when the first light burns out the photo cell kicks in the second 2 the one is outside so you can see it and replace the first.

another trick is get 200w 220v incandescent lamps the filaments are heavier and run them on 120v you ger 100 watts out of them.

tom

Brilliant ideas!
Very illuminating discussion.
Thanks.

 

[JeremyL]

We use a couple of incandescent bulbs. But they are slowly getting phased out, and, I believe, are going to be regulated away. Is that right?

I heard that someone in Germany (?), where they are banned, is selling incandescents not as "light bulbs" but as heating elements to get around the prohibition. Will we have to deal with that at some point?

Inquiring minds want to know.

 

[RadarTech]

I have to ask... where is your pump? And, how far underground is the waterline connected to the well pump?

The top of our well sticks out of the ground about a foot. Its just a pipe with a cap where the wire go in. The pump is at the bottom of the well, 80' down. The water line connects to the side of the well casing about 4' underground, well below the frost line. No one around here every insulates the top of their well pipe because it never freezes, even at -22 below zero. We do, however, use decorations to hid the well cap, such as fake rocks and wishing wells.

The pump is a submersible one and it is about 375 feet down.
The pipe that froze was the pipe from the well casing that goes from the galvanized line coming out of the casing to the ground where it goes underground to the house.
The pipe to the house is about 20 inches under ground..

Thewell head is above ground.. As is the water line junction to the house does that make sense?

 

[dave1949]

We use a couple of incandescent bulbs. But they are slowly getting phased out, and, I believe, are going to be regulated away. Is that right?

I heard that someone in Germany (?), where they are banned, is selling incandescents not as "light bulbs" but as heating elements to get around the prohibition. Will we have to deal with that at some point?

Inquiring minds want to know.

I thought I heard that about Canada.

No, we won't have to deal with it, we can also reclassify incandescents to heat lamps We're Americans, after all.

I would guess true heat lamps will be around for a long time. Like those used by chicken brooders, McDonalds to keep food warm, etc. I hope so because I have two of them in my kitchen range hood
Dave.

 

[riptides]

Nice ideas....

I have both a pressure tank and the well pump sitting in a small 4X8X4 cinder block housing. I run a simple heat lamp. Have never had an issue and the temps were down to 8 degrees the other night, I think wind chill pushed it well below zero.....

 

[SandburRanch]

As long as one has elect. power the challenge is usually simple by using heat lamps of some type or even just letting a very small stream of water run from a faucet.

When electric power is lost is when keeping plumbing from freezing becomes more challenging. At that point a generator may be handy, if it will start and run. Have you kept yours in top working order? Another choice may be to drain the pipes and even the water heater if there is a longer term outage.

Most household plumbing isn't designed to drain by gravity so a little air pressure would do the trick if the plumber did his homework and installed an air injection fitting in an appropriate location. Oh, but wait, the air compressor has leaked off and we said there is no elect. power. Now we're getting down to the bottom of the barrel for solutions.

Maybe we're lucky, we have gas heat that works without being on the grid. AH HA, I have an idea. I'll heat water in a couple of pails and when they are plenty hot the wife can carry those two pails of BTU's out to the little well shed while I'm preparing more BTU's.

See, I told you it can get complicated.:laughing::laughing:

 

[MossRoad]

The pump is a submersible one and it is about 375 feet down.
The pipe that froze was the pipe from the well casing that goes from the galvanized line coming out of the casing to the ground where it goes underground to the house.
The pipe to the house is about 20 inches under ground..

Thewell head is above ground.. As is the water line junction to the house does that make sense?

Yes. That makes sense. Good explanation.

Very strange setup, I will say. Up here, the pipe to the house comes out of the side of the well casing below the frost line. As I mentioned, ours is about 4-5 feet down. The only thing that comes out of the top of the 4" pipe is the electrical lines. I wonder why they do it that way down where you live?

Seems a lot of folks that are having problems with freezing in this thread are talking about well heads and pump houses.

Most new pumps up here are at the bottom of the well and buried lines all the way as I described.

The older ones with the pump above ground have the pumps inside the house, as is the expansion tank. We NEVER have freezing problems with either setup because all of the lines are buried below the frost line.

Of course, most of us have basements, too. But even slab houses have the water lines buried deep enough to the well to avoid freezing.

What we do have problems with is outdoor garden hose faucets freezing, then bursting inside the house. Older houses have a shutoff valve about a foot inside the house. You close that in the fall and open the outside faucet to drain it. Newer houses and retrofits have outside valve handles that have a long shaft to actuate the valve, which is actually a foot back inside the house.

Seems a lot of the folks on here with problems could solve all of them if they would have all of the lines buried and have the pump at the bottom of the well as described above. Perhaps it is a case of "we have always done it that way".

 

[bdeboer]

Seems a lot of the folks on here with problems could solve all of them if they would have all of the lines buried and have the pump at the bottom of the well as described above. Perhaps it is a case of "we have always done it that way".

I think in situations like mobile homes, farmhouse without a decent crawlspace or houses built slab on grade the pressure tank is quite often put into a well house. Although our local well driller typically buries a pressure tank near the submersible well. If you pull the cap off from the well casing there will be a description of where the pressure tank is located.

 

[SPYDERLK]

The pump is a submersible one and it is about 375 feet down.
The pipe that froze was the pipe from the well casing that goes from the galvanized line coming out of the casing to the ground where it goes underground to the house.
The pipe to the house is about 20 inches under ground..

Thewell head is above ground.. As is the water line junction to the house does that make sense?

Item #3580K22 Near page bottom. Self regulating.
McMaster-Carr
larry

 

[MossRoad]

I think in situations like mobile homes, farmhouse without a decent crawlspace or houses built slab on grade the pressure tank is quite often put into a well house. Although our local well driller typically buries a pressure tank near the submersible well. If you pull the cap off from the well casing there will be a description of where the pressure tank is located.

Yeah, we do have mobile home parks around here. The ones I have seen are on a common water distribution system and each unit doesn't have an individual well. The pipe out of the ground is usually insulated pretty heavy and they are told to leave the sink trickling on cold nights. Lots of them use hay bales jammed between earth and floor surrounding the pipe.

Personally, I would never live in a mobile home around here. Tornadoes have a way of making you a believer in basements.

 

[clemsonfor]

I was up late on Saturday night. Sleeping in a bit late on Sunday when I hear the wife say to the kids, "Maybe something fell and that is why we do not have water." Hearing "...we do not have water." got me quickly out of bed.

Turned out the water supply had frozen up. We had had 2-3 days where the high temps did not get much about 34. Lows Sunday morning were 17 at best. The thermometer I keep in the well house was just at 32 degrees.

The well house is a small, ugly insulated wood box that I built as a temporary solution 6-7 years ago. The box aka well house sits on the concrete slab around the well head. Our pressure tank sits in the well house.

To keep the plumping from freezing I run TWO CFL's in those hand held work lights. I run two lights since if one burns out the other would still be working and the water supply would not freeze. At least that was the theory.

One of the CFL's burnt out and the water froze. So my theory was not so good.

We have an electric space heater which I used to warm up the well house and melt the ice. :thumbsup: The heater has some sort of thermostat but I do not have the manual anymore since we bought this thing 15 years ago. I did find a thermostat that plugs into a power outlet. The thermostat turns on whenever the temperature goes to 34/35 degrees. I thought of using this with the space heater.....

In the end I just went out and bought two more work lights and an extension cord to run the lights. Now it will take the loss of three light bulbs to get freeze our water supply. :laughing: Each of the bulbs are only 11 or 13 watts so there is not a lot of power use or heat. The lights are placed around the plumbing leading from the well, to the tank and out to the house.

What do other people do to keep their well supplied water from freezing?

Later,
Dan

I think your problem is the CFL's. Your well house is not where you want to get cheap cost effective green energy. You want one of those energy wasting 60 or 75 watt incandessants to give off the heat you need. If you still want 2 lights, you could use 2 40watts to save on energy but still provide the needed heat. You can touch even a 100w comparable, really like 19 watts or something, and not get burned.

 

[SandburRanch]

Seems a lot of the folks on here with problems could solve all of them if they would have all of the lines buried and have the pump at the bottom of the well as described above. Perhaps it is a case of "we have always done it that way".

-------------------------------------------------------------------
You've probably hit the nail on the head.

I once ask a fellow why his house didn't have a basement. His response was similar. "We've always done it that way and I've never seen one that didn't leak. Besides, I don't plan on raising Salamanders".

 

[clemsonfor]

Well DUH!

But CFLS last ALOT longer than incandescent bubs. The two CFLs have worked for 6 years. We would have gone through dozens and dozens of incandescent bulbs during that time frame and we would have frozen the water supply multiple times. Instead of once.

The question is how many watts of heat do you need to keep from freezing. In my case I now know it is more than 11 or 13 watts. With four CFLs the chances of me loosing three at one time to get down to 11 or 13 watts is pretty slim to none.

DUH!

Later,
Dan

I understand the CFLS last longer but incandesants will last a long time to and cost like .99 cents for 4. You know you can walk over to it and check it every week or 2? Or you could put them on a timer to only come on at night, depends on where you live i guess if you need them all day.

 

[clemsonfor]

In my well house i have a 300w work light in the house. i turn it on when the temps go below 30F. The pipes in it dont freeze but i have a spicket in the side of it, thru the brick. It will frezze up every time even though the light is pointed at the water line on the other side of that brick. The spicket also has one of those foam things on it on the outside. It has not busted the pipe yet but freezes solid for days sometimes, even here in SC.

 

[SPYDERLK]

Reveiw the thread for ample choices to use a self regulating heat system as low as $11.
larry

 

[clemsonfor]

My pump house was described in an earlier post and reading all of this got me to thinking. I don't have a well but an in-line pump to boost the pressure of the rural water system. At the road is the water meter made out of concrete maybe two inches thick and the water line with the meter is one foot(at the most) deep at the bottom. It's not covered on top or bottom (dirt at the bottom of course). There is a 3x5 inch thin metal door in the top for the meter reader. This is the system used for the entire water system of Tuscaloosa and probably most of the South. This doesn't sound like must protection. We do have the occasional cold spell where the lows are in the single digits and the highs below freezing. I've never heard of on freezing. Why, and how is it done up North.

I have that type here in SC too. What keeps it from freezing? The fact that its one foot in the ground with each end of the line in the dirt and surounded by the box. Our frost line is like 1 inch below the surface, so just being in that underground box will keep it from freezing.

 

[clemsonfor]

We use a couple of incandescent bulbs. But they are slowly getting phased out, and, I believe, are going to be regulated away. Is that right?

I heard that someone in Germany (?), where they are banned, is selling incandescents not as "light bulbs" but as heating elements to get around the prohibition. Will we have to deal with that at some point?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Yes we will thanks to the Obama Admin. The 100watt bulbs will be the first to go.

 

[NIdaho]

Ok folks here is what we have at home in North Idaho and at our lake place in Western Montana (I know it got down to -40F there a few years ago as that is as low as the thermometers we had there would go and both of them were bottomed out). I used a 6' long piece of 6' in diameter galvanized culvert. Dug a hole in the ground approximately 5' deep about 6 ' from the well cap and put the culvert in with open ends down and up. Water is fed thru the pitless adapter thru the well casing into the culver/pump house. Brought electricity to the culvert/pump house and installed a small sub-panel and the starter box for the submersable pump (also have a GFCI outlet and the controller for the sprinkler system wired in) 220 gallon equivalent Pressure tank, Pressure switch and everything else is in the culvert/pump house. I then made a lid to set on top of the open end of the culvert with a 6" overhang and insulated it with foam board
and then sheeted over it and covered it with roll roofing. I actually painted the part of the culvert that sticks out of the ground a light brown so you don't see the shiny galvanized 10-12" sticking out of the ground and mounted an outlet on the outside for plugging in Christmas lights there as well.

Our ground water is about 42-45 degrees F so as we use water in the house the pressure tank and pipes are being filled and refilled with 42-45 degree water. The frost line here is 42-48 inches and so the bottom of the culvert/pump house is below the frost line and the ground temp is about 45F. Both systems have been in place for over 20 years without a problem.

At the lake cabin I drain all the pipes in the fall and put antifreeze in the drain traps and toilet and dishwasher, but the pressure tank and pump are functional so that when we go during the winter we can get water (the lake is usually 2-3' thick ice.)