Winterize Your Outdoor Faucet With A Surprising Pool Noodle Hack

There are a lot of things to take into consideration when winterizing your house. Not only do you need to think about how to keep you and your family warm through the colder months, but you need to make sure that your outdoor appliances and home attachments are ready too. This is especially true with your outdoor water faucets. Failing to properly winterize these could lead to some larger-scale plumbing disasters. Fortunately, a simple pool noodle can be an absolute game changing hack for your faucet winterization.

An outdoor faucet needs to be properly drained and shut off before winter arrives. If you don't do this, the water will freeze inside the pipes. This will compromise the outdoor faucet, but it can also lead to more widespread plumbing damage in your house. If you have older piping made out of copper or other metal, ice can easily expand and crack the metal, causing leaks that could be costly to repair.

So, how can a pool noodle prevent this from happening? Well, just like using them as a draft stopper for your door, you can utilize a pool noodle as a seasonal insulator for your outdoor faucet. This can come in handy, especially if you either forgot to turn off the water or need the faucet for outdoor winter tasks, such as feeding animals.

Pool noodles are made out of polyethylene foam, the exact same kind of material used to manufacture pipe insulation. Polyethylene has incredible heat-trapping factors and is also highly moisture-resistant. That means that in the event of winter weather, your outdoor faucet will remain snug and dry. To make a pool noodle faucet cover, cut a length of pool noodle and place it over your faucet. Stuff additional insulating material into the noodle's hollow cavity if needed, then tape everything off to ensure an airtight seal.

While the pool noodle will work to an extent, it is by no means a complete solution. If you live in milder climates where winter temperatures hover in the 40s and 30s, the pool noodle trick should work just fine. However, if you live in an area that routinely sees long-lasting temperatures that dip well below freezing, you'll need to take extra measures to make sure your outdoor faucets don't freeze and burst.

The best way to do this is to shut off the water line that leads to your outdoor faucet and drain away any remaining water. Leave the line open all winter long to ensure there is no water left inside that can freeze. This should be part of every homeowner's winterization checklist. Once the faucet is drained, cover it with your pool noodle insulator just to keep the cold winter air from getting at the rest of your plumbing.