The Importance of Turning Off Your Outdoor Spigots

Why It’s Important To Turn Off Your Outdoor Spigots In Cold Climates.

All about outdoor spigots! In cold climates, it’s extremely important to turn off your outdoor spigots. In this video, Troy shows us how simple it is to turn these off, in preparation for the cold weather. In this video, these are quarter-turn ball valves, some homes may have full rotating gate valves. It’s important that these are turned off before the cold weather. If these aren’t turned off, it can lead to burst pipes in the spring. If your valve isn’t working, or you need them replaced, please reach out to us and we can assist!

Watch our Video and You’ll Learn:

• Why You Need To Turn Off Your Outdoor Spigots in Cold Climates.
• How To Properly Turn Off Your Outdoor Spigots.
• Turning Off Your Outdoor Spigots During Cold Climates.

Listen To The Audio

Enjoy this transcript below!

Troy: Hey everybody, Troy Champion Plumbing out of Eagan, Minnesota. Today we’re in Eagan. I wanted to get a quick video up on how to shut down your outside spigots. Beautiful tankless water heater, side note. In most of the houses in the suburbs, what we’re going to have is the main is going to be coming up out of the floor. Then you’re going to have a shutoff valve.

Then you’re going to have your meter.  A lot of houses will have this pressure-reducing valve in here, but not all of them. Shut off valve, meter, then another shutoff valve. And then you follow the copper line. And in the suburbs here in Minnesota, it’s going to tee off and go a couple directions. One is going to a shut-off valve with a bleeder on it.

This is going to an outside spigot. It gets so cold in our winter times, we have to shut the water off, otherwise, we’ll have freezing and breaking and a lot of damage.

You follow your copper lineup. It’s going to tee off. And another thing almost all of us have in the suburbs is a water softener. If you follow the 3/4″ line to the water softener to the inlet of the water softener, everything after that is going to be softened water. And we don’t soften our outside spigots. So you want to find before it gets to the softener, two 3/4″ shutoff valves that should have a bleeder on them. Here’s one of theirs and here’s the other one.

The main comes in, tees off this way for an outside spigot, tees off that way for an outside spigot, and then goes to the water softener and then feeds the rest of the house soft water.

The one caveat here is sometimes there’s a 1/2″ line going to the refrigerator or your kitchen sink because we don’t soften that a lot of times. Calcium is good for us, not good for our fixtures.

So what we’ll do is shut down these valves. You turn it off, it’s a 1/4 turn valve. So you just turn it off like that. I go to the outside. Open up my outside spigot, let that drain down, come back in here and with a bucket, take this off and it’ll drain down any of the water that’s trapped in this line. At that point, you’re good for the winter. Just reverse course in the spring.

And remember you do have to do it to both valves if you have a two-valve system. There are some cases where they’ll put both of them on one and tee off somewhere else, but most houses you can isolate each individual outside spigot.

Hope this helps somebody shut down those outside spigots. And if you need help, give us a call 651-365-1340, or look us up on the web www.championplumbing.net. Thank you.