This is rarely one of our more popular posts, but an essential one for us northerners. If you’re operating irrigation systems, it’s important to winterize them before the cold sets in!
We are quickly running out of days where our overnight lows are above freezing. Soon, we’ll dive into freezing temperatures all the way until next summer. The time to winterize is before those regular freezing temperatures roll in as we can’t expect much of a thaw, even temporary.
The tool for the job is called a blowout valve. Sometimes these are called RV winterizers. The gist is that they allow you to hook up to an air compressor to common irrigation fittings, allowing you to blow air through your irrigation lines, valves and hoses.
The reason us northerners should do this is because water expands when it freezes. Water, when left in the lines, can easily destroy valves, fittings and even split open hoses and irrigation lines. With what things cost these days, preventative measures to keep your stuff in working order is paramount!
As you can see, we put together a little winterization kit. We put our air compressor into our garden cart, which allows us to bring our winterizer right to where we need. We’ve generally designed our irrigation systems to minimize the points where we need to hook up, thus saving us time during this process.
We generally run several tanks through each line and hose. This ensures we get the overwhelming majority of water out of the system. It’s OK if there’s a little bit of moisture left in the system, that’s inevitable. But, we want to make sure the lines are relatively free of water.
Before we started doing this, we were always chasing irrigation issues in the spring when we’d get things running again. It was annoying. We knew we needed to winterize, but sometimes our stubbornness leads us to trying out short cuts. Sometimes they work out, but often we find we have to do things the hard way.
We’re definitely in the process of shutting things down, here! We’ve got just a few more crops to harvest, but with temperatures diving into the 20’s and 30’s after today, the gig is definitely up!
Winterizing & Maintaining Garden Irrigation Systems In Cold Climates
