Farm & Ranch Freezing Pipes?
It’ll Never Happen Contributed by Kasha Ford
Despite many horse owners’ best efforts, the freeze
wreaked havoc on barns throughout the southwest. For those of us without heated waterers, we were not only going out and breaking ice in water troughs and feed buckets hourly, but we were also frantically wrapping and covering all exposed pipes. Many of us, despite our best efforts, succumbed to
the weather and rather than spending the warmer days that followed the freeze riding, we spent them repairing and replacing pipes. The evening before the bad weather my husband and I dutifully went out, turned off all water hoses and removed them from the spigots then covered each spigot with a Styrofoam insulator intended to prevent freezing. As an added precaution, we also turned on space heaters in our tack room to keep the pipes above from freezing over. We then smugly went to bed thinking with the horses double blanketed and the tack room heated all would be well. In the morning when checking on
the horses, we found a spigot along with the insulating cover 20 feet across the aisle. Because the pipes on the in- terior of the barn were not wrapped, and the freeze was so strong and quick, it not only froze and cracked the pipe but it also completely sheared the spigot from the wall and sent it flying
across the barn porch. When we initially built the barn five years ago, we
prove helpful in keeping these unwrapped pipes in this
well ventilated barn from freezing.
Horse body heat did not
constructed it with ventilation in mind as I had an older horse with COPD & allergy issues. We used in- sulated paneling on the ceiling and thought that with a heated area where the main water enters the barn, if we covered spigots and exterior pipes we would be fine in the limited freeze time we experience here in Central Texas. This last bout of “unique” weather really proved us wrong! When the following week’s better weather ar- rived, we found ourselves cutting and removing, repairing and reinstalling pipes. The entire process took the better part of four frustrating hours as we have quite a tall roofline and several interconnected pipes. Number one on our spring “to do” list is to
cover ALL the roofline pipes. Those four hours repairing could have been better served riding! w
Climate Water Setup A Typical Warm
12 SouthWest Horse Trader March 2011
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