In this video we are going to thaw some frozen
pipes. one of those jobs is a frozen outside tap which is normally relatively easy to fix in the
UK at the moment it has been negative figures for at least a week and yesterday it was about
minus nine degrees C I know that's pretty warm compared to some places in the world such as
Canada but in the UK that is quite cold and it can cause quite a lot of problems with pipes freezing
Etc you do have to be aware that when a pipe freezes if for example it's copper and it can't
expand there is a chance that the pipe will split it's only when the weather starts to get warmer
and the pipe thaws you may have a flood on your hands so you do need to be very careful and you
need to be aware of things like that happening obviously prevention is much better than cure so
if you can it's a good idea to lag up any pipes that might freeze before the bug weather comes
obviously if you're watching this video you may not already know that so we're going to look at
a couple of ways of how to safely thaw some frozen pipes it doesn't matter if the pipes
are plastic or copper but a copper pipe does have more chances of splitting because it can't expand
like a plastic pipe can in this first example we've got a frozen outside tap so what I'm
going to do is I'm going to get a freezer bag and I'm going to fill out with some hot water
obviously if the water supply to the house is frozen you may need to use some bottled water
and you may need to heat that up in a pan or in a kettle Etc what you don't want to
do is get boiling hot water because that can be dangerous it only needs to be hot
seal that up and then we'll take that outside put it on the stop tap
you can now actually open that already
so the tap's in the open position now with the bag on it and hopefully it'll be enough
heat in that it'll just melt the ice that's in there and we'll be able to get some water
of course you can stop this from happening by installing a outside
tap cover which I've covered in another video
so that's a quick and easy way to thaw an outside tap when it's frozen
this time we're going to defrost this pipe which is the main incoming pipe
to the property as you can see there is a stop tap there and what tends to happen is the pipe
that comes out of the ground can sometimes get fronen or the water in there can get frozen,
I've actually got a digital thermometer here which is infrared and if we can get that on
the pipe you can see that that is minus 11 degrees which is obviously very cold
the stop tap is is -12 so in order to thaw that pipe out we need to apply some heat
to it carefully you could use something like that which is a cordless heat gun
that would generate enough heat to thaw a pipe
like that out eventually but you're much better off using a fan heater
so this is the one that I've got which is a Stanley and they often use this in
the workshop so I've got the heater quite close and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to heat
underneath the stop tap where the water comes in from outside because that will be the coldest part
eventually when that thaws you will get water back at the tap we're now inside the property
and as you can see we have no water at the tap I'm going to leave the tap in the open
position and when the tap thaws we will get water coming back out of the tap as
you can see we've got actually zero degrees now which is probably thawed out the pipe
so as you can see by thawing the main incoming stop tap we've now got water back in the property
you can of course use the freezer bag full of hot water you can simply hang
that on there and leave that for as long as possible so there's a good chance that that
will thaw out the stop top and ideally you do need to put one lower down at floor level
if you have a hot water bottle obviously that would be ideal
and that should enable you to thaw out the pipe if you're lucky enough to have copper
pipes you can of course use a blow torch if you're using a blow torch you have to be very
careful what you can use is set to a gentle heat and you can gently use that to thaw out the pipe
the important thing with this is to keep it moving
but you can use that to thaw out a frozen copy pipe or any other metal pipe
I hope you found this video useful if you have
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