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Polar Vortex - Extreme Cold Farm Ops Tips

So it’s mounted on the wall and the other end goes into a heated room? You might not have one with a long enough rear/shutoff valve connection for the wall thickness, or it’s not angled correctly to allow drainage.

https://www.woodfordmfg.com/woodford/HowAFaucet/HowaFaucetWorks.html

I have no ties to Woodford, but based on my experiences with their hydrants (and reading about them plenty here) I’d change your wall faucet to a Woodford if you don’t already have one. :grinning:

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Yeah, I’m 99% sure it’s just holding a little water in the ball-valve area when you turn it off. Wouldn’t take more than a few drops encasing that ball valve to cause it to seize up.

You could add a faucet sock to your existing heat tape method. Or ask your plumber about a frost-free silcock

we had a problem with our Woodford. Ours goes well into the heated room, but had frozen up on me earlier. I just got the replacement rod kit and that seems to have solved the problem. Replacement kit is cheap and easy to put in.

I shouldn’t say anything yet because our cold snap is still going strong, but I’m hoping that was the issue.

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Exactly. I had my farm worker peek at it yesterday and he noticed that the arm going into my tack room is just barely angled upwards and he thinks it’s trapping just enough water to freeze it despite the heat tape. I’m going to take a hair dryer to it today and see if it thaws out to test that theory!

Is the ball valve just inside the spigot?

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The shut off valve in a non-freeze wall hydrant is not right at the outside. It is back inside the heated space (and the hydrant is supposed to be installed sloped so the water drains out from the valve out).

Edit to add:
Here is a random thing I found that shows where the valve is (it is not a ball valve, BTW).

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Interesting, I have a Woodford faucet that goes from the heated tack room to the barn aisle, and I also had problems with it freezing. I thought it was an installation issue (that plumber did a lot of stuff wrong) but I used a level and it had plenty of slope. I ended up building it a little insulated cover made of a cardboard box and spray foam insulation. I’m going to look into those rods.

This is what I got

Woodford Adjustable Rod with Pressure Relief Valve to Prevent Bursting (10-Piece)-RK-ADJ-PRV - The Home Depot

I’ve had 800-1000 chickens at a time for the farmers’ market business. One old wives’ tale I think does work is adding ground cayenne pepper to the water 1/4 tsp to a gallon) or red pepper flakes to their feed. In the feed, it helps has the added bonus of deterring vermin.

I’ve always been wary of heat lamps. Doubly so after a beautiful historic bank barn near our old house caught fire from one falling onto bedding. Killed a sow &’ her piglets & a bunch of other animals that were FFA kids’. Premier 1 does make some kick a$$ sturdy lamps meant to withstand lambs & kids more than chickens. I splashed out on a couple of those when we had bottle baby goats. And I’ve seen a really clever idea where someone made a ‘UFO’ lamp houses.with a 55-gallon plastic drum. Currently, we have a rooster who lives alone because he can’t play nicely with others. I put hand warmers in his little coop for him on very cold nights.

That sucks about the wildlife. :frowning: I love opossum. They’re so delicate & prone to frostbite even in regular mid-Atlantic winter temps. Seems like a glitch in the Matrix that they are like that. We had one that lived under our deck in the winter of 2019. I finally put a cat igloo out there with a body heat reflecting pad in it for it.

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Speaking of chickens, I was hopeful mine would do okay with these temps, but I ended up having to relocate them to a dog kennel in my garage yesterday because they were getting frostbite on their combs. This is my first winter with chickens, so I didn’t know what to expect. They didn’t want to free range in the snow, but they still came out of their coop and hung out in their covered run all day long, which is how I suspect they got the frostbite. With temps hovering near and below 0 for the next several days, it was either the garage or lock them inside their coop :woman_shrugging:

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goats are ready for zero degree that is forecast for Monday night

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Adorable !

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Hope they stay in, is going to get ugly for us, not our normal.
News reported Fort Worth had a mile long wreck in the ice with piled up cars and trucks.
I always wonder about how cold is cold, some of the numbers from up North are right down scary.
This is our weather report for the next few days, notice the high of 2F Sunday, low of -9F Monday, blowing snow, mostly several days of that weather, everyone is worried:

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our forecast keeps changing but Monday the 15th has us a high of 14F and low of zero… but they keep changing things some…coldest in over thirty years they are saying… but by Sat the 20th, back to the 60F area

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At least our cold spells don’t last all winter, grateful for small favors.
I feel sorry for those up North, that real cold is miserable.

Expected to dip below freezing here Sunday night Monday am. And raining too. Brrr.

Remember those pheasants I saw across the field pecking at bare branches, so I went out and dumped some seed for them? Well I think I need to find me a Parelli-type pheasant trainer because these birds clearly have my number. After convincing me to trudge through 3ft drifts every day to go put some seed out at the fencelines, now they’re coming right to the house by the dozen and practically pecking at the window glass to demand more.


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Just a shout-out to my tractor. The roundbale that I thought would last til the weekend was on fumes by last night. So I had to plow my way back to the hay shed (about 1/4mi) and pull a bale out this morning before work. It was 5-below and I crossed my fingers while waiting for the tractor glowplug to go off. And then grinned and patted the dashboard as that beast started right up on the first crank. Goooooood boi.

We’re heading into the worst of it over the next couple of days. The water’s coming up from the frostfree hydrants pretty slow, so I decided to fill the troughs now, as long as I still have unfrozen pipes.

Hang in there, peeps!

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Good for you and your tractor!

Stay safe, it looks like is going to be a long, bad storm for most everyone.
It is hitting here now, we are already down to 8F and is snowing lightly.
Someone forgot to close that North gate.

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winters of the late 1970s were just nearly impossible which encouraged us to move south…it wasn’t only the winters but the spring mud season was just another discouraging factor

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Thank you for the pictures. They are beautiful!