Cold weather: Check outside waste pipes ...

I was thinking about this a while back. Most of us have outside drainage pipes. I've only had one house where the foul stack was inside and that was pain to work with, so I cursed a lot. Residual heat from the house and waste water can deal with short cold spells. If we are going to have longer colder winters we'll probably have to think about insulation for the pipes. What do they do in really cold countries? All inside I guess?

Peter Scott

Well a pipe with no water in it cannot freeze... So don't have dip that will collect water, like the OPs pipe had, and make sure you don't have any dripping taps. I guess if it got *really* cold it could still freeze in the pipe, after all when it's reallly cold piss will freeze before it hits the ground and I'm not talking about women. B-)

I don't know. My problem was the slight dip, which meant there was a point where the pipe was effectively submerged. Of course once that freezes, then further discharge simply backs up, and carries on freezing, leading (in my case) to about 10' of ice. Presumably if the pipe was straight, it would be much harder to freeze up.

As I said, no real harm done. I'm pretty annoyed though, because one of this autumns jobs should have been to reroute the pipe *inside* down the WC next door to the utility (where the washing machine is). But I can't help but feel I need to research it more. I'm concerned about siphonic action, when the toilet is flushed, emptying the U- trap, and allowing foul air into the house.

It's all* inside at our place in north Minnesota (where it'll get down to around -30 on the cold days). I've not had a problem yet with the septic system freezing, either, although it can happen (and the opposite side of our road falls within a different township and their building code requires insulated tanks).

• other than the well, although the feed/return lines for that are about

cheers

Jules

Now that I've cleared the vegetation from the back of my house, I discovered that the 10 metre long waste pipe was touching the ground in the middle. That's because all of the horrible plastic clips had broken. I started to make some metal clips but was told not to be a cheapskate as the hardware shops would have some nice metal clips.

I checked all the hardware shops and none had clips big enough (about

P.S. it never freezes here!