Hose Bibb Replacement & Freeze Protection

Make sure to remove your hoses before the first winter freeze. Otherwise trapped water will expand inside the hose faucet body and burst. It's the most preventable plumbing failure in the Northland and one of the most destructive, because a split spigot usually doesn't announce itself in December — it announces itself in March, when someone turns the water on for the first time and it comes out inside the wall behind the faucet instead of outside.

Guardian Plumbing replaces exterior hose bibbs across Gladstone and the surrounding towns with frost-free sillcocks, which move the shutoff point back inside the heated envelope of the house so the section that freezes has nothing in it to freeze. We set them with the correct downward pitch so the barrel drains every time you shut it off — a frost-free installed dead level is a frost-free that still bursts — and add a vacuum breaker where the setup calls for one.

The same visit is the right time to handle the rest of the cold-weather list: insulating vulnerable runs in crawl spaces, unheated garages and exterior walls, shutting and draining any interior valves that feed outdoor lines, checking the condition of shutoffs before you need them in an emergency, and walking you through what to do if a pipe does freeze. Call us in the fall and this is routine maintenance. Call us in January and it's an emergency repair with drywall attached.