Since we are just getting into winter you might want to consider running a new line across the ground and insulate it. Never entirely turn it off and it will take some very cold temps to freeze it. Or run a heat tape inside the insulation.
Plastic pipe is relatively cheap in the US. Pex is very popular here and you can buy it in 250 ft plus rolls. Plus it will not break if the pipe freezes solid. I have some black 1" Polyethylene tubing that connects my well to the house and that is even less expensive than Pex. A power chain trencher will go through frozen ground. Another option is to have someone come out with a directional boring machine and have them make you a hole from the cistern to the cottage. We have frozen ground here - down at least two feet now - and I saw several crews out recently running plastic gas lines with directional boring machines. They can push a rod through dirt probably 100 meters or more around here. Of course if you are sitting on bedrock then that won't work well. We have to put water lines down at least 3 feet in the midwest USA to avoid freezing. Just north of Detroit, Pontiac Lake has a foot of ice on it already and I heard they are driving cars on it. I cannot recall it ever getting this cold, this early. I just drove back from Detroit. Currently at -7 C. in Northern Indiana :-) Dave On 12/25/2010 4:45 PM, andy pugh wrote: > I am at my parents' house for christmas. The water supply pipe is > frozen, somewhere underground and we have no water. This is putting > rather a crimp on things. > > Is there a well-known solution to this problem? It is a somewhat > unusual supply, being a private, communal supply fed from a spring > into a cistern. The cistern is not frozen, and we think that other > houses in the hamlet are OK. (Which at least limits how much pipe we > might have to dig up to warm up.) > > The pipes are plastic, so the idea of resistive heating is probably out. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn how Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) One Node allows customers to consolidate database storage, standardize their database environment, and, should the need arise, upgrade to a full multi-node Oracle RAC database without downtime or disruption http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
