OT: Water Pipe Insulation

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Heat tape.

For example:

Then wrap with insulation.

For you HEAT tape., Wrap your pipes and plug it in.

As for cold, it got 60F here and we should be seeing snow on the ground and very chilly temps.

Must be that global warming disaster! :)

Jamie

Eliminate as much "exposed" pipe as possible (earth berming, etc.). Wrap the remaining (exposed) pipe in 40 mil tape (esp anything below grade). Then, a length of rubber insulation (they sell these prefabbed for different ID's -- match pipe OD). Finally, coat the exterior of the insulation with metalized tape (to protect from Sun exposure).

We moved the upstream regulator *inside* the house (garage adjoins the muni water entry) and replumbed so we only have 12" of "exposed" main (which includes the local shut-off for the house).

Beyond the entry to the house (garage), a master irrigation valve (which must be above the highest point in the irrigation system to ensure the irrig line doesn't drain *into* the muni water supply when pressure is lost/local fire fighting) feeds a separate regulator (for the irrigation system). But, there is no water in this line as the master valve is electrically "off" when not in use.

We've never had a problem -- despite being in one of the colder parts of town (26F last night).

Others wrap pipes with blankets or heat tape (and remember to turn that *on* before retiring each night).

In cold climate installations the pipe remains below the frost line and enters the house from the floor. In your case the heat tape would work fine and take very little power. Some tapes even have a built in thermostat.

I doubt it'll get below freezing under the house with only a few hours down to 15F unless there it is over-ventilated. A little insulation (as others have pointed out, this stuff is readily available) might help. If you're really paranoid, thermostatically controlled heat tape is available. It'll use no electricity until it's needed. In this case, it likely never will. ;-)

Thursday, top of Mt Lincoln at Sugar Bowl, 8400 ft, it was 20F and

40+MPH with sun and blowing snow.. People are predicting 5F here on Tuesday.

Look carefully at those rocks: people have been *skiing* there:

On the way up, swirls of snow traced the contours, like the smoke streams they use to visualize air flow over cars and airplane wings

So, people stand in that cold and wind, trying to work up the courage to push over the edge...

which is about 300 feet of 45 degree slope, mainly ice.

So far, the California drought situation looks pretty good.

A. Keep the water running, a trickle is all that is needed.

B. Heat Cable/Tape, Make sure you get an outdoor rated heater. Most are for crawl spaces and unheated garages. The regulator probaly will not freeze if the pipe is heated.

C. Incandesant lights can also be used in a pinch to keep pipes from freezing.

I take it you don't have a basement, our service enters 3' below the soil line. I knew some one with the same problem where the entrance was in an unheated garage. He used the light trick on cold nights, and later changed to the heat tape.

Cheers

Heat tape and then wrap that with the insulation wrap. I dont have a good well house (yet) and that setup kept the well pipes protected when we had 3 days and it never got above 29F. You better get the wrap tomorrow morning before everyone is sold out.

I suspect you will have a few hours below 32F and then warm back up.

--
Chisolm 
Republic of Texas

Yep. It's Arizona... just before dawn is the problem time. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

to really freeze a pipe, but if you're worried.. here's one source.. these guys can probably ship overnight to you, and a cracked tap will keep from freezing until then.

It's been a really green (more like brown) Xmas here in the frozen north this year.. rain and substantially above freezing most of the time, at least the highs.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Remember the old, insulated boxes they used to make line printers quieter? Something like that.

You need to build an insulated "mast" for the vertical rise portion, like a stand for a mailbox, or the like... 1" x 4" or 1" x 6" square box around it. Insulating it from wind chill effect should be enough, but if not, you can add that heat tape they invented for trailer park 'victims'.

The horizontal part can be boxed as well, and you can make a doorway for the access to the regulator.

something like this should be enough:

if you are really scared put a pipe heater under the foam.

Bye Jack

--
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?

I second the insulated box method. You need to instrument it to be sure, but given heat from the ground on one end and the house on the other, you may not need anything more. My crawl space stays about 50F no matter what the outside temperature. The wireless remote temperature transmitters work great for monitoring that kind of stuff.

I've been experimenting in that area. I've been using a 60W incandescent light bulb in the garage for the last 40 years. Got the urge to automate it and made some discoveries.

The self regulating heat tape is made of some polymer material that degrades over time. I'd check it occasionally.

I expected a hockey-stick resistance curve like you see from some of the PTC resistors. Ain't so. Yes, the resistance goes up, but it's rather gradual. I'd post the measurements, but they've been filed somewhere just beyond the reach of my memory ;-(

This has some graphs

I put a foot of it on a short pipe coming out of the concrete. It stabilized somewhere around 80F.

I experimented with bi-metalic electric heater thermostats. They're not designed to work down there and if you tweek them, the resetability and stability and hysteresis render them useless.

I have a battery-powered digital furnace thermostat with a latching relay. It won't go down to 30F, but you can shunt the sensor and move the setpoint up so the firmware can switch the relay in the 30F range and up.

IN the process of all this I discovered you can buy a gizmo that looks like a 3-way plug adapter that has a thermostat in it. Specs are loose, but if you can get the sensor to be the same temperature as the pipe, it might work. I bought an adjustable sensor designed to turn on a light to alert your neighbors that your furnace quit so they can call you. It's bi-metal, but designed to work down where it's needed. Initial tests in the freezer look good. Been too warm lately to test it, but should be cold enough this weekend to look at the temperature differences between the pipe and the location of the sensor.

I fully expect that I'll just use the mechanical sensor. It's likely to be good enough. The design is done on the accurate electronic system. All that's left is the boring part of packaging it. I hate boring.

Bottom line is that I've spend more $$ on gas acquiring stuff than I'll ever recoup by replacing my incandescent light. Guess that's why they call it a hobby.

Depending on where your pipe comes out, you may be better off/safer using low voltage lights, or just a resistor clamped to the pipe, for the heat source and run wire thru the wall to wherever it needs to go. Put an insulated box around the whole thing. Stick a flower pot on top to make it look like it belongs there ;-)

It got down to -7C last night here. My outside water tap has a length of this foam self seal around the 15 mm copper pipe. The foam on mine is 50 mm overall diameter and the tap is enclosed in a polystyrene box that came with a vase inside. It's simply fastened with an elastic band round the tap, through the styrene and a pencil through the band outside. Mine does not get direct sunlight but if it does then some turkey foil around it will solve that problem.

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Best Regards: 
                       Baron.

Huh? Is 35* with a 5 mph wind (windchill of 31*) going to freeze water in a pipe faster than 35* with no wind?

Mikek

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Your problem is you fail to observe all the factors working here. Like that the wind there is rarely a mere 5 mph, and average ambient is charted against a constant temperature wind. These wind currents are chilled below ambient ground temp, so spright standing apparatus does chill faster than the standard chart, so yes, a boxed vertical rise from the ground would suffer far less chilling, than an exposed one, and any heat it emmanates would get 'contained' within said box as well, further raising your claimed ambient figure.

Yes. Boxing it would be better.

You dodged amdx' question.

pipe/vessel... free standing water... possibly, depending on the dew point.

Wind chill is for humans... if, for instance, you can define someone who chooses to live in Chicago, "human" >:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

The whole reason a trailer needs the tape is because the pipes going into the trailer are all exposed for several feet, under the "windy" trailer belly.

This is why they got shrouds, and why they got hot tape. A shrouded trailer works down to a certain temp.

Wind chill 'factor' characterizations by "weathermen" is for humans.

Wind chill itself is very real. Water chiller air conditioning systems count on it. Latent heat is a mother, and boundary layer breach by the breeze puts that into perspective.

The entire way a heatsink with fins operates is by wind carrying off the heated boundary layer air over the radiating metal fins. Otherwise, we could just use thick slugs as heat sinks, and they would not be misting water into a breeze they blow over football players on hot game days.

The air striking the pipe carries away what little boundary layer heated air it might have "on it", and most certainly chills the pipe.

Paint it black, and the hot summer sun will have the opposite effect on the exposed pipe's contents.

Put it in a white, insulated box, and it stabilizes between both influences far better than being fully exposed to both does.

In regular daily use, and with you only worrying about a few morning hours, it should always be above that cold morning temp, as it will not have time to settle in as it will be losing heat a lot slower.

Sorry, but wind chill is real. We have had ice ages that prove it succinctly, and iconoclastic flows that show it in a different range, scale, and direction.

It is wind which slowly allowed the Earth to cool from a hot, orange red molten mess to the point where water started pooling, and the base nucleotide soup could get started that made us.

By the same token, without it, we would be as barren and cold as Mars by now and likely also an essentially water free planetoid.

We needed all those comets. Probably needed that big impact that made the moon as well.

But for daily temp swings, a box and a blanket should do fine. I find homeless folks bundled up in or near boxes all the time. Humans are pretty good transducers. Folks just need to know how to interpret the data such that it produces useable information. Data without processing is just data. Information is discernable, processed data. Wind chill is very real.

[snip]

"convection" feature of the oven.

Sonovagun! Who would have guessed ?>:-} ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.