Rejoice! New Hydrant
February 4th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in farming
If anything could possibly be more tiresome than trudging through two feet of snow to feed the animals it might be having to fill buckets of water in the kitchen and trudge through those same two feet of snow to deliver water. But that’s exactly what we were forced to do last year when the “frost-free” hydrant we had installed near the livestock paddock froze. Not once. Not twice. But at least three times.
We’re still not sure why that happened, although last winter was exceptionally cold and long. We heard that other nearby farmers experienced the same thing. The way these hydrants work, the water is supplied from a pipe five feet underground. You lift the handle, water exits the spout. Then when you close the handle, any water left in the pipe flows back down into the ground and empties out of a vent. In theory, five feet is below the frost line, meaning the leftover water should always have a means of draining out the pipe without freezing.
So how did our hydrant freeze? Our well driller speculated that the pipe above the surface got too cold and the water flowing backward froze before it could make it back underground. Another possibility is the drainage area wasn’t sufficient around the bottom of the pipe for the water to exit the vent. Our well guy likes to bury the pipe connection inside a plastic bucket. My theory was “all of the above,” meaning the cheap, off-the-rack hydrant in question and the means of drainage were all crap.
When my brother-in-law Steve heard this story, he steered me to a hydrant manufacturer he’d run across at a trade show. Merrill advertises it’s hydrants as top of the line, and from what I could see looking at their design online, I was sold. The mechanism is engineered like a clock, not like my old hydrant, which more resembled something made from an Erector set. Merrill hydrants are individually constructed when ordered. I placed my order with a plumbing distributor in Bennington, VT, and soon enough it was delivered to the farm.
The excavator who had dug the trenches for the water lines said he had his suspicions about the pipe-in-a-bucket system. One day last summer, he returned with his backhoe, dug out the old hydrant as well as the bucket, filled a big hole with stones for drainage, then installed our new Merrill hydrant.
So far this winter, our low temperature has been -14, compared to -15 a year ago. We’ve had other lows of -13 (twice), -10 and -6. Yet we’ve had nary a spec of trouble from the new hydrant. The water flows exactly as it’s supposed to. No more lugging buckets from the kitchen. What a relief.
Total cost for replacing the old hydrant: more than $300, but totally worth the price of admission. My advice for anyone considering a frost-free hydrant of their own: don’t skimp. Buy the best you can get your hands on. And make sure you’ve got plenty of drainage. The only fix is to do it all over again.
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