I need to insulate a loooooong length of hose for winter

Any suggestions?  I have a main hose and a T split - one going to our tenant's tiny house and the other currently to our hoop house.  The run down the hill is... 150-200 ft?  Needless to say, we turn it off and rain most of the winter which is a pain in the butt.  Eventually, we'll have rainwater collection for the tiny house and the mobile home that will replace the hoop house on the site.  All of that water comes from the main well that supplies the main house.  

I'm in Massachusetts.  And although the winters have been fairly mild the last couple of years, there's always freezing anyway.  

So, what could work for insulation for overland hose.  We don't want to dig it in for a lot of reasons.

Thanks heaps,

We have about a 200 ft garden hose that we use to water our wildlife.

We buried this hose.  Our temps have gotten down to minus 10' F.

I have heard that some folks stack hay bales on top of their buried hose/pipes.

Another really great suggestion I read about from a guy in Maine is to use sheep manure.

I am looking forward to hearing other folks' suggestions and best wishes for finding your solution.

Thanks, Anne!  I like the idea of using bales!

I don't have hoses, but drain pipes from run off as the ground freezes. As the ground freezes it squeezes the water out of the hillside down my ditches which go into a drain pipe into the ground and out the side of a hill. I use to always have to break off the ice at the end of the pipe to keep the water flowing. If I forgot then the pipe froze and I ended up with water flowing over my driveway creating ice due to the overflow. Due to ledge the drain pipes are only 2-3 feet deep and way up here near the Canadian border the ground will freeze 4 feet down or more. I run heating tape, like what you might use for gutters, down the pipe and out the end and as the water flow starts to freeze I plug the tape in and no problems at all. I did use bales of hay once, but that didn't work too well when temps got down to -30F.

where I live sawdust is plentiful. What about covering the pipe with a 1 foot mound of sawdust? Its removable later on. It might need to be adjusted periodically. It will also decompose over time and need to be renewed.

some other ideas;
planting trees near it
protecting it from the open sky.
leaving it running ever so slightly when the weather is near freezing.
draining it when it will not be used. ( this might intale a shut off at your house up the hill. fill things up, than drain the line.) This is how our well pump functions currently.
another variation
design the hose near the bottom(lowest point) to have a "leak" So when its not in use it leaks slowly. You close the line off up at the house at say 8pm. The water line leaks empty. Turn the water on when you get up in the morning.

I think the "above ground burial" using something organic, hay bales, manure, sawdust, wood chips, leaves, compost... has a LOT going for it. Especially leaves, since they arrive at the correct time of year to be useful, and can be gotten (even delivered) for free, or even be collected as a side gig for ca$h and prizes!
Then in the spring, you get to use it for compost or mulch. Talk to some arborists and landscapers about getting wood chips and leaves dropped off. Where I am near Boston, they are often paying tipping fees to unload the stuff, so they can get back to work raking in the dough.

I guess the other issue is whether the water is ON all the time to the tiny house, or if the tiny house has a self-contained water/storage system that just requires topping up. If that were the case, you could just fill-up and then drain the hoses.

Another idea that might help, if there's a water tank in the hoophouse, you could trickle the water on especially cold nights/days to keep it from freezing. Although this might cycle your well pump a lot if you have a small pressure tank.

Organic hay bales and straw bales work best in my opinion.  Other things can work, but things like leaves blow away, or get wet and smashed down, get smashed flat from snow weight, all sorts of issues.  Wood chips may work if they were coarse and deep enough, but I still prefer bales.  I would add that when I do it, I use rolls of plastic to cover the bales to keep them as dry as possible.  The drier they stay, the better they insulate.  In spring, you can just use them as mulch, compost them, or plant right in them AKA "straw bale gardening".  There is some expense involved but the multiple uses makes it worth it for me.  

The actual frost depth is about 30in in your area. But seeing as how digging isn't an option for you. You can just lay the pipe on the ground and throw some insulation on top. But how much insulation do you need? Maybe R-30 for the 30in of soil to the frost depth. So now that we have an idea of how much insulation you need. What could be use for insulation?

You could insulate with:
hay/straw (R-30 aka 15inch)
earth/compost (R-30 aka 30inch)
rockwool (R-30 aka 7inch)
foam/etc (R-30 aka 7inch)
I would probably double all of those numbers, just to be on the safe side.

You could get a recirculating pump to make sure that the entire lenght of pipe have the same temp and it isn't freezing in some section. Maybe even turn on a hearter once the temp of the pipe get down to a specific temp say 40F.

Nissa Gadbois wrote:Any suggestions?  I have a main hose and a T split - one going to our tenant's tiny house and the other currently to our hoop house.  The run down the hill is... 150-200 ft?  Needless to say, we turn it off and rain most of the winter which is a pain in the butt.  Eventually, we'll have rainwater collection for the tiny house and the mobile home that will replace the hoop house on the site.  All of that water comes from the main well that supplies the main house.  

I'm in Massachusetts.  And although the winters have been fairly mild the last couple of years, there's always freezing anyway.  

So, what could work for insulation for overland hose.  We don't want to dig it in for a lot of reasons.

Thanks heaps,

Another suggestion is if you have a garden and you mulch your carrots so you can harvest during the winter with out the ground freezing then you can mulch the hose in a similar fashion.

S Bengi wrote:The actual frost depth is about 30in in your area. But seeing as how digging isn't an option for you. You can just lay the pipe on the ground and throw some insulation on top. But how much insulation do you need? Maybe R-30 for the 30in of soil to the frost depth. So now that we have an idea of how much insulation you need. What could be use for insulation?

You could insulate with:
hay/straw (R-30 aka 15inch)
earth/compost (R-30 aka 30inch)
rockwool (R-30 aka 7inch)
foam/etc (R-30 aka 7inch)
I would probably double all of those numbers, just to be on the safe side.

You could get a recirculating pump to make sure that the entire lenght of pipe have the same temp and it isn't freezing in some section. Maybe even turn on a hearter once the temp of the pipe get down to a specific temp say 40F.

I think like Trace says, DRY is important. Some of these insulation materials only work if they are dry. And thinking of underground homes such as Wofati/Mike Oehler/John Hait, the "umbrella" over the top keeps the soil surrounding the structure dry, therefore free from frost.
It might be an idea to make shallow drainage trenches either side of the hose-way (tossing the spoils to the center to raise it up) and cover the hose-way and hose with a waterproof material before adding the insulation material, which itself would be covered.

Now, with S. Bengi's minimums for R30 in mind, you could probably get away without any of the waterproofing if you just GO BIG! I've made leaf piles/windrows 6+ feet tall and 12 feet wide which had dry leaves at the base that were still dry come springtime. The leaves do in fact mat down, but this helps shed the water to the sides. Another factor is thermophilic composting could be good (warmth to fight the winter chill) or be bad (like Legionella bad.) So, things to think about... there's probably a happy medium.

The circulating pump idea is kinda neat. In fact, where I am right now, the domestic hot water system has a circulating pump and a loop to maintain hot water at the taps on the fourth floor! It doesn't need to be a big pump since it works the same as a hydronic heating system (a closed system), the weight of the falling water on the downhill side of the loop siphons the water up the uphill side.

How much hay is a bale by volume? Cause I am getting 11.6 cubic yards of material just to cover the hose 15" deep.

I really like Jordan's ideas, especially the one about having the hose run dry after use.

I also like the idea about having the hose run dry after use, at least if the tiny house had a water tank so that it wasn’t drawing well water too frequently. If the outdoor hose only had fast-flowing water in it, then maybe it wouldn’t have time to freeze.  

You might already have an anti-syphon valve installed to allow air into the hose as the hose empties. I wonder if a solenoid valve with a remote switch could make switching the water on-and-off more convenient.  (even if that part had to be insulated and heated it still might be easier/less expensive).  I’m not a plumber but it looks like these two valves are made together in one assembly.

The drain pipe from my house to the septic is buried very shallow owing to our very mild winters, but last winter we had a cold snap that dropped to about -10F.  The drain pipe partially froze, which I melted by running a lot of very hot water through.  But to prevent this from happening again I bought some straw bales and plopped them on top.  The drain pipe stayed nice and thawed and by spring I had a lot of straw!

Eric