How to Prevent Water Pipes From Freezing at -40° | YeloDeer In Pipe Heat Cable

Mark here and today we're going to talk about freeze protection, water pipe freeze protection. So if you live in a rural environment or if you have a seasonal cabin or if you have a sump pump that may freeze during the winter months and of course if you do live in cold climate like I do here in southern Manitoba, Canada. Now this video is sponsored by Yellow Deer which specializes in freeze protection in-line heating cables. So Yellow Deer did send me this six foot length here. It is actually CSA for potable water and does come with a GFI, a ground fault interrupter, in case something happens with moisture in the area where you're using it. So we moved out here to the property in 2001 and we had a well drilled septic field and we moved a mobile home onto the property. Now what the company did who installed the water line is they ran the line from the well to our mobile home and they wrapped the outside of it with a heat trace. I believe they may have put some insulation on it. It's a while ago. I can't remember exactly how they installed it but it ran for a number of years. We then built our house in 2008. We sold our trailer. We moved that out. We moved the mud room off to the side of our existing building and we ran the pipe into what is now our barn area. So we hooked it up and found that it had failed and the line froze. So when you live in Manitoba or any other cold climate that gets down to minus 40 degrees, you have to wait until spring before you can hope to thaw anything out. So we remember that well from carrying water from our house out to the barn and buckets to water our animals. So a solution we came up with is an in-pipe water heater. Very similar to what this product is although there is one exception. This one is a self-regulated heating cable. So the pipe we installed was a heat trace that didn't have self-regulation. So we soon found out that when we turned on the tap we were actually getting hot water. So a quick fix around this that stands to this day is we hooked up a timer that has those little pull and push tabs for every 15 minutes and we have it set to run for 15 minutes and shut off for 15 minutes. It's a little bit of a workaround. It works. This system here is self-regulating. So what happens is as the cable heats up the resistance in it will change and it will lower. So what happens is there's less heating involved. So I did a thermal test on this running dry which you can run it dry. So this is great for a sump pump if you're coming into the spring season and you have a long sump pipe that goes out that maybe isn't graded very well. You can have this line in there. Plug it in. It would get up to 40. It didn't quite get to 40. I think it was 39.9 degrees was the maximum this ran and it pulled 14 watts of power for this six foot section. So you can do the math if you have a longer run. You can divide your 14 watts into the six feet and then multiply it into 40 feet or 50 feet. Yellow Deer does have a lot of different lengths for this product. So it's advisable to measure up your system first because you don't want to be cutting this system. It's designed to work as intended by its size. So getting into the install of this product. Very easy to do especially if your pipe is already out of the ground. What we had to do with ours is because the line had failed on the outside of the pipe. Of course we're not going to be digging up the front yard and driveway. It would have just been too much of a headache and too much of a cost. This is very economical to do. Basically what you do is you straighten it out as best you can and then you fish this into the line. So we got about 25 feet in before the friction was fairly tough to push anymore. So knowing how much line that you have to get down below your frost line is important. Here in Manitoba six to eight feet down is frost line. So we want to get down ideally below eight feet. So if you have a length of pipe we'll use this short one as an example and you want to run it out on a new installation. What you would then do this is the end we'll call inside the house inside the heated environment where your pipe is or your pump is and this is outside your other building your supply building. You want to go and take some kind of tape or string or a small rope and what we did is I tied a little sponge something light that would move really easily in a little piece of cotton works great. Stick it in the line and then just take vacuum cleaner and stick it on the inside line where your pump is. Turn it on and it'll suck that line through. Once you have it then you'll want to just secure it with some tape around the end here. Now before you actually pull it into the line you want to get your fitting. So the heating cable comes as is with your heating cable. It does have some fittings here on the end and it has a rubber grommet in here just to create your seal. So no need for teflon tape on the outside of this one as you do have a rubber piece in here that compresses it in. So that's your compression seal. Now this area here this does get attached to a fitting and that fitting does not come with the the heat trace because there's a lot of different ways that you'll install it. This here is a standard three-quarter inch MPT male pipe thread adapter and I have picked up just a polyethylene. I got a piece of polyethylene three-quarter inch pipe here and then a fitting. So something to note on this you don't want to you want to stay away from 45 degree 90 degree angles especially if you're pushing it because you'll have a real hard time getting in there. You want to have as straight of a run as possible but you can use different types of material. It is good for plastic, it's good for metal, it's good for a lot of different piping materials but you want to try to go with three-quarter inch and up for diameter. That's what this best suited for. Now if you're running a main line from a pump out from somewhere you're probably not going to run a half inch. It's your supply line so you're going to be running a three-quarter or even a one inch. So what you want to do here is we want to get it through the fitting. So kind of figure out how this is going to go. This is going to attach to here. We're going to want to go through this as well. So always remember to put it through your fitting first. There's a few times where you you know I've gotten a little excited and it's like oh let's just get it in there and you get all together and you're like oh I forgot to put this piece in. So not the end of the world if you forget but just lay it out all in front of you so you kind of know what you're doing. There we go, there we have it. We have our compression fitting here, our connection male MPT to female MPT and then we have our connection on here. Of course I'm not putting Teflon tape on here for this demo but it is definitely advisable that you do that. That gets hooked up to the end, this screws on to here, your compression fitting goes on and you'll have to take a look at this when you pressurize the system. This is I believe 120, 200, 230 psi maximum. Sorry I had to look that up. I had a bunch of numbers in my head. But what happens is when you get this all you always want to double check to make sure your Teflon tape is holding good and your compression is also working well. So this is what it's going to look like. You've got your heating cable in. You want to make sure that the blue section of the heating cable, you can see that right there, you don't want to be hooking it onto this section here. You want it back. So that goes onto there, this comes in and tightens onto there. Your water line comes in from outside and then now you're inside the building and this would go off to your, let's call it a suction pump, if you're sucking water up. Maybe it's at a seasonal cabin or a full year round cabin and you always want flowing water even in up into your pump or if you're pumping out to maybe we've got animal water feeders. So keep in mind when I say that this is a self-regulating heat trace line, it does self-regulate but it doesn't shut itself off. So Yellow Deer does have a product that will regulate. You can set the temperatures. It is an extra optional add-on. In my opinion, it's not really required. 14 watts of power over 6 feet is a small amount to pay to have running water. So that's it for this video. I hope you did enjoy it. I think I covered everything on it. It's a great solution to an issue that I don't wish upon anyone. Anyway, I will leave all of the information down in the description. So please head down there, check it out and if you have any questions whatsoever, I'll see you down in the comments. Take care and have a wonderful week.