When talking about plumbing, most people are usually referring to the inside of households. However, plumbing outside of your house might be of the same importance, if not more important, than inside plumbing.
Nevertheless, many plumbing works take place outside our houses, and they are not limited to gardening and barbeque kitchens in your backyard. Outside the house, you might find several important facilities such as main pipes and water main, which ensure water supply to your house.
And if you want to know more about the outdoor plumbing and how important it is for either the water supply of your house or additional water facilities that you may install in your backyard, this article will explain it to you.
We think that it is important to start explaining outdoor plumbing from the most important part of the water supply of any house, which is the main lines. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the main lines because if something wrong has happened with them, the water will not go to your house at all. So it is very important that they are in a good state and do not have any leaks.
Actually, main lines are a very complicated issue because they hide under the turf, and there are so many of them, so it is hard to know whether something is wrong with them, especially if you are not a professional.
Therefore, you must be very careful and attentive. If you hear something strange from the area of main lines and drains, do not hesitate to call a professional plumber because it is almost impossible to fix problems with these pipes without professional help.
You would not be able to deal with these problems by yourself because only professionals have all the necessary instruments that help them to locate the leak, which is the hardest part of dealing with main water lines.
Sprinklers are not such an important part of outdoor plumbing as main water lines. However, if you like to keep your grass green and clean, sprinklers can make this task much easier. They can also save you a lot of time because when they are installed in your garden, you do not need to walk almost every morning with a hose.
The main problem with the sprinklers comes from their main advantage, which is the fact that they are installed under the turf. This means that it would be hard to one where the leak is. And even if you find it, you would have to spend a lot of time digging a sprinkler, fixing it, and installing it back. That is also the main reason why you should call a professional when you install sprinklers for the first time because if they fit in the wrong way, it would be much harder to fix them in case something goes wrong.
Also, the chances are that only a professional can install them in such a way that all the grass in your backyard would receive the same amount of water. Because otherways one part of your grass could be overflooded why another would not get enough water.
It is also important to know that sprinklers are usually connected directly to the main lines of your house, so the place of connection must be sealed in a proper manner. Otherwise, you can have a leak of a large amount of water which would cost you a fortune.
Probably not every reader of this article has sprinklers in the backyard. However, anyone has a sewer, and problems with this part of outdoor plumbing are the most common among people.
The most common problem with sewers is the fact that they can easily clog. And a clogged sewer may create many problems for the household because it does not allow waste to go outside the house, which leads to an unpleasant smell inside the house.
If your aim is to obtain access to clean water outside the doors of your apartments, the chances are that you would need to construct a faucet outdoors, and now we will describe to you how you can do it and how to properly maintain it.
Firstly, we have to mention that having a faucet outdoors may pretty much simplify your life because it would allow you to properly supply such things as barbeque or outside shower with water. Also, it would simplify your gardening.
Another good news about installing an outdoor faucet is the fact that such a job requires a minimum of financial investments and only one day of dedicated work in your backyard.
When installing an outdoor faucet, make sure that you have all the necessary instruments for this job, such as:
The first step in setting up your outdoor faucet is to dig a trench, so it is better to be in good shape before starting installing your faucet. But even if you forget the road to the gym, you are still able to have this task done relatively fast because the trench for pipes should be only 15 cm deep.
However, if you want to get rid of all possible damage, you can dig as much as 30cm but not every soil would allow you to do so.
When the trench is ready, fit the pipe inside, and in order to protect it, put a bit of soil and concrete on it before burying it under the ground. It is advised to use PEX pipes outdoors because they are much more resistant to changes in temperatures and more flexible in general.
When your PEX pipe is under the ground, you have to attach one end of it to the copper pipes of your house with a transition fitting.
The next step is for people who live in freezing temperatures; before running the system for the first time, they have to blow it out. Also, if it applies to you, remember that this operation has to be done every autumn before the first freeze.
In order to have this task done, you need to turn the valve after you need to connect an air hose to the valve. Let the moisture get out of the system by opening the faucet and when it is done, close the faucet and blow up the water.
The last step of this process is actually installing the faucet itself. But before doing it, you first would need to build a faucet post that would protect the part of your PEX pipe that is above the ground level. When it is done, you can actually mount a faucet.
Here it is important to remember that outdoor plumbing may be subject to local regulations, so you need to check the law on such subjects as mandatory backflow preventers that might be required by the law to be installed on your outdoor faucet.
A hose bib is another instrument that can help you to have water in your garden, which in fact is much simpler than outdoor faucets or sprinklers because a bib is just a spot in the wall of your house through which you can connect a hose. And with the hose, you can obviously do almost all gardening but in a less efficient way than with instruments that we have mentioned above.
Also, hose bibs are considerably less problematic than other outdoor plumbing facilities because they are open, and in case something goes wrong, you can easily access them and fix them without a need to dig something.
I bring over 9 years of dedicated plumbing experience to the table. As a seasoned professional in the plumbing industry, I've tackled a wide range of projects, from residential repairs to large-scale commercial installations.