I have a similar system. After having to find a convenient tree in the forest behind which to hide (if you get my meaning) in the dark frozen cold early AM on one occasion I bit the bullet and put in a 1 1/2" poly pipe burried deeply with a tracer wire. The problem I had was caused by a road regrading. The tracer wire is to help find the pipe where it is burried. You can plug a signal in to locate the pipe years after you've forgotten where you burried it. As I understand it, the modern PEC (and similar piping) is even better. Poly pipe and PEC will stand more freezing/thawing without failure. Copper, PVC, and Iron are not as forgiving. But onto finding the freeze. Likely it is: 1. close to the cistern, 2. close to the house or pumphouse, or 3. Where the terrain has changed most recently from grading etc. It will not be easy to find if it isn't one of those. My run is 420 feet from the cistern to the house and I'd hate to dig that up - again.
About the drip freezproofing - take care not to overload your septic system. You can force excess sediment into the system by overfeeding the input to the drainfield. If it is a gravity system you probably shouldn't put more than, say, 300-400 gallons per day into the field of a 3 bedroom system unless you have particularly good drainage. I supply the heat tapes to my pumpless pumphouse from a GFI circuit for safety. (System is gravity feed, but there is a boost pump for high pressure apps like washing milking barn floors.) D. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jack Coats" <[email protected]> To: "Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC)" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, December 25, 2010 2:40 PM Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Non EMC: Advice from Cold Climates > Resistive heat tapes are usually OK. They are thermostatically > controlled. > but do be sfe... > >><> ... Jack > Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart... Colossians 3:23 > > > > > On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 3:45 PM, andy pugh <[email protected]> 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. >> >> -- >> atp > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > 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 > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
