Winter is coming! If you don't know how to winterize your hose bibs, get ready! Do it now! It's a simple two step process (three for some homes). If not, you could end up with a big expensive mess!
The first step in how to winterize your hose bibs is to shut off the water to your bibs. Seems simple, and it probably is. In your unfinished area of your basement you will usually find the valves near the main water pipe, and will probably even have a tag on it labeled "Hose Bib".
If you have 2 hose bibs outside, you will probably have two valves, so make sure you get them both! Righty tighty, left loosy. So, turn them to the right. Some will be just a 90 degree turn, but older ones, might have an actual valve handle that you will just rotate until it's tight.
Second, open the hose bibs outside to let the water drain. Leave it open all winter!
Third, if you have it, open the vacuum breaker inside your house to let the water drain back INTO the house and away from the cold!
In the video below I walk through all these steps in detail and you can see how the vacuum breakers work also. You don't need to let them comletely drain, you just want to get the water a few feet away from the outside of the house so it won't freeze on really cold nights. So, after you bleed off a little bit of water, you can close the vacuum breakers again.
And then when springs comes, you just reverse this process! You probably want to turn OFF your outside spigots first so you don't flood them with water. Then slowly open your hose valves from your basement and you're done. After you open them fully, walk outside and make sure you don't have water gushing out from anywhere. If you do (and assuming the spigots are closed OFF), then you need to run back downstairs and turn off the water to the hoses again and call a plumber! But if you properly winterized your hose bibs, then that shouldn't happen and you should be just fine. This is a normal part of being a homeowner!
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