For four months the front spigot wore a strip of blue painter's tape that said NO in Tessa's handwriting. Underneath the tape was a hose bib that had frozen and split in January, and behind it, in the basement, was a little valve I'd shut with numb fingers at ten o'clock on a weeknight while water dripped off a joist onto the floor.
That was our first winter mistake as homeowners. We left a hose connected to the front spigot all fall, didn't know the line had a shutoff inside, and found out the hard way during a cold snap. When it warmed up a few days later, the cracked pipe inside the wall started leaking. Nothing major got wet, but the tape stayed up until last weekend.
Why a frost-free sillcock
An old-style hose bib has its valve right at the outside wall, so the water sits in the coldest spot in the house. A frost-free sillcock moves the valve to the end of a long tube that reaches back into the heated basement. When you turn the handle off outside, the water in the tube drains out the spout, as long as two things are true: the sillcock slopes down toward the outside, and there's no hose attached to trap the water. We failed the second one last fall.
I bought a 12-inch Woodford Model 17 at Menards. I measured from the face of the siding through the rim joist and decided 12 inches would put the valve comfortably inside the basement, not inside the wall. It also has a built-in vacuum breaker, which keeps garden-hose water from being pulled back into the house lines. With two SharkBite fittings and a tube of exterior caulk, the whole job came to $62, and the rebate slip went into the kitchen junk drawer with the others.
Before I cut anything, I checked the city's permit page and called the office to describe the job. The person I talked to said a like-for-like spigot swap on an existing line was fine for a homeowner to do. That was our situation in our city, and I'd ask again before doing anything bigger.
The cramped part
The outside was easy. Four screws held the old flange to the siding, and the rest of the bib pulled out once I'd cut the copper inside. The supply to the front spigot turned out to be a short half-inch copper branch from the 1980s work, which is why SharkBite made sense here. The hole through the rim joist needed opening up a little with a spade bit to fit the longer tube.
The inside was not easy. The front wall of the basement has about seven feet to the joists, and this particular bay was shared with a heat duct and a bundle of old wiring. I spent most of an hour with my arms over my head and a headlamp on, getting seventy years of dust in my collar. Safety glasses were the best decision I made all day.
The steps went roughly like this:
- Shut off the branch valve, open the spigot outside and let the line drain into a bucket.
- Cut the copper square with a tubing cutter, then deburr the inside and outside of the cut.
- Slide the new sillcock in from outside, set a slight downward slope with a torpedo level and a cedar shim behind the flange, and screw it down.
- Thread a SharkBite adapter onto the sillcock inlet with pipe tape, then join it to the copper with a SharkBite coupling.
- Caulk around the flange outside so rain doesn't follow the tube into the wall.
The joint that wept
My mistake was step four. SharkBite fittings need the pipe pushed in to a specific depth, and the instructions tell you to mark that depth on the pipe first. I skipped the mark because the fitting made a satisfying click. When I opened the valve, the joint started weeping, a bead of water every few seconds that ran along the copper and dripped on my forehead, which felt personal.
I shut the water off again, popped the fitting loose with the little release tool, measured, marked the depth with a Sharpie and pushed it on until the mark met the fitting. Dry. I wrapped a paper towel around the joint and checked it before bed and again the next morning. Still dry.
Outside, the new spigot runs strong and shuts off with a soft gurgle as the tube drains, which is exactly the sound I wanted to hear. Tessa peeled her tape off the spigot and asked if she could have it back for the garden. I've added a line in red to the fall section of the house sheet: hoses off before the first freeze, no exceptions.
Trip count: 2. The second was for a bigger spade bit.
