Winterize Outdoor Faucets & Blow Out Sprinklers Before the First Hard Freeze

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The Short Answer

Before the first hard freeze: disconnect every hose, shut off the interior valve to each outdoor faucet, open the outside faucet to drain it, and leave it open for winter. Then blow out your sprinkler lines with compressed air, one zone at a time, or have a sprinkler company do it. Do it before the freeze, not after. Once water is trapped and frozen, the damage is already done.

I’m a licensed property claims adjuster. A connected hose is the #1 burst-pipe cause I see, and a burst hose bib is the most common freeze claim in my files. The whole job takes about an hour, and most of it costs nothing.

The Hook Most People Miss: A Frost-Free Faucet Doesn’t Save You From a Hose

Here’s the point most homeowners aren’t thinking of. A frost-free sillcock, the long-stem faucet that’s supposed to be freeze-proof, puts its shutoff valve deep inside your warm wall, so the water stops well behind the cold. That design works. Until you leave a hose connected.

A connected hose traps water in the faucet and the hose itself. That trapped water freezes, the ice backs up past the valve, and the pipe splits inside the wall, where you can’t see it. The frost-free faucet did its job. The hose defeated it.

Same story with a regular hose bib, only faster: the hose holds water against the faucet, the faucet freezes, and the split happens behind the siding. You won’t know until the thaw, when water starts running inside the wall.

So if you do one thing from this article, disconnect the hoses. Everything else below is the full job. But the hose is the claim.

When to Do It

Do this before the first hard freeze (a night in the 20s, or several nights at or below freezing), not when the forecast already shows one coming tomorrow. In USDA Zone 6, which covers much of New Jersey and the mid-Atlantic, the usual window is October 15 to November 15. Warmer zones run later; colder zones run earlier. Your local forecast beats any calendar date: if a hard freeze is in the 10-day forecast, this is the weekend job.

No hard freeze where you live? Your version of this job is shorter: check irrigation for leaks and outdoor faucets for drips. A slow drip in a warm climate is a water bill, not a burst pipe. But a cracked backflow preventer from one surprise freeze still happens in places that “never freeze.”

Part 1: Outdoor Faucets (Hose Bibs)

Work in this order. It matters, because each step depends on the one before it.

1. Disconnect every hose

Remove every garden hose from every outdoor faucet, drain the hose, and store it out of the weather. This is the step people skip, and it’s the step that causes the claim. A hose left attached traps water in the bib, and that trapped water freezes back into the wall.

2. Shut off the interior valve

Most outdoor faucets have a shutoff valve inside the house, in the basement or crawlspace, on the line feeding that faucet. Close it. If you can’t find one for a faucet, that faucet has no interior shutoff, which makes steps 3 and 4 even more important. And it’s worth having a plumber add one before next winter.

3. Open the outside faucet and drain it

With the interior valve closed, open the outdoor faucet fully and leave it open. Any water left in the line between the valve and the faucet drains out. Leave the faucet open all winter. A closed faucet traps whatever water is left; an open one gives freezing water somewhere to go.

4. Put an insulated cover on each faucet

A foam faucet cover is cheap insurance over the outside faucet. It doesn’t heat anything. It slows the cold reaching the faucet, same as pipe insulation buys time inside the house. Put one on every exterior faucet, including the ones you rarely use.

5. If you have a frost-free sillcock, don’t trust it blindly

A frost-free sillcock only works if the hose is disconnected and the faucet is left open enough to drain. With a hose attached, it freezes like any other faucet. And the split happens deeper inside the wall, which makes the repair worse. If yours is old, drips, or the handle is stiff, have a plumber check it before winter rather than after a burst.

If you only do one thing from this article, disconnect the hoses. I see this exact fact pattern every single winter. It’s practically a seasonal tradition in my claim files.

Part 2: Blow Out the Sprinklers

Sprinkler lines sit shallow in the ground, and they hold water in every low spot. Draining alone doesn’t clear them. In cold climates, the only reliable way to get the water out is a compressed-air blowout, one zone at a time.

1. Shut off the irrigation water and turn off the controller

Close the irrigation shutoff valve (usually near the main, or a dedicated valve for the system), then set the controller to off or rain mode so no zone tries to run while you’re working. Open the drain valves on the system if it has them.

2. Never blow air through the backflow preventer

This is the expensive mistake. Do not push compressed air through a pressure-vacuum breaker (PVB) or reduced-pressure (RP) backflow preventer. Air can crack it, and it’s the most expensive part of the system to replace. Connect the compressor downstream of the backflow preventer, at the blowout port. Drain the backflow preventer separately and leave its valves half open for winter.

3. Blow out one zone at a time, at low pressure

Connect a regulated compressor to the blowout port, set the regulator before you open a zone, and run one zone at a time until only mist, then only air, comes out of the heads. Then stop. Don’t keep running dry air through a zone that’s already clear; it builds heat and can damage heads and valves.

Pressure matters more than most people think, and more pressure is not a better job. Per Colorado State University Extension: no more than about 80 psi for rigid PVC and no more than about 50 psi for flexible polyethylene pipe, with drip zones at 30 psi or less (or drained instead of blown out). Start at 50 psi and raise it only if the heads won’t pop up. Never exceed your pipe’s cap.

What clears a line is air volume, not pressure. A small pancake compressor has the pressure but not the volume, and pushing harder to compensate is how valves and rotors get damaged. If your compressor can’t sustain the airflow for a full zone, rent a larger one or hire a sprinkler company. A pro blowout is a fast, cheap visit compared with a cracked manifold.

4. Drain the rest and leave valves open

After the blowout, drain any remaining low points, leave the zone valves and drain valves open or half open as your system manual directs, and insulate any above-ground pipe and the backflow preventer. Take phone photos of the shutoffs and drained lines when you do the job. Documentation is what turns a fight into a paid claim if something does go wrong.

Part 3: The Other Outdoor Water

Outdoor kitchens, pool houses, and outdoor bathrooms: shut off the supply, drain the lines, and winterize the traps, same as the hose bibs. These get forgotten because nobody uses them in winter. And that’s exactly why they burst unnoticed.
Above-ground pipe and exposed backflow preventers: insulate them, even in milder zones. They’re the first things to freeze because nothing around them holds heat.
Hoses and splitters: drain them, coil them, and store them. A splitter left on a faucet holds water against it the same way a hose does.

What Happens to Your Claim If You Skip This

A burst pipe in a lived-in, heated home is generally a covered claim, sudden and accidental water damage. But a burst from skipped winterization gets fought as maintenance, not bad luck. The carrier’s argument is that the loss was preventable and the homeowner let it happen. The same neglect framing that kills claims when a home is left unheated.

That doesn’t mean every skipped-winterization burst is denied. It means the claim starts as a fight instead of a payment, and the fight is over facts you can no longer prove after the fact. The photos of your shutoffs, drained lines, and faucet covers are the proof. Take them while you’re doing the job. Five seconds, and they’re the difference between “I winterized it” and “here’s the photo from the day I winterized it.”

If a pipe does burst despite all of this, stop and read 5 Things To Do in the First 10 Minutes After You Find Water Damage first. The actions you take in the first hour directly affect both the damage and your claim. And for the indoor half of this job, see How to Keep Pipes From Freezing.

Bottom Line

Disconnect the hoses, shut off and drain the outdoor faucets, cover them, and blow out the sprinklers before the first hard freeze. A frost-free faucet doesn’t save you if the hose stays connected. The hose is what traps the water that splits the pipe inside your wall. An hour in the fall beats a month of repairs in February, and the photos you take while you do it are the proof that turns a coverage fight into a paid claim.