Guys, you’ll making a mountain out of a mole hill. First, on hoses. I still use the blue PW, but last time I bought a couple was about 6 months ago, and they had to go looking for awhile to find enough blue to make me up a couple of 100’s. So not sure BCE even has anymore. But to this day I’ve never left mark on anything.
On the freezing issue, simply undo your quick disconnect for your whip line where it comes off the pump/unloader and the water will drain from reel back down through it. Leave your valve open when you roll up your hose, (which you should do anyway, since it will make you hose lighter as you’re reeling), your reel always going to be higher than the ground, so that takes care of draining all your hoses and reels. Hopefully you’re wiping down all your hoses when you roll up anyway, that takes care of any excess water on them, may still be a little damp but most of that will dry pretty quick.
I always have a shutoff coming from water supply. Shut that off, turn your motor over a couple of times on medium throttle, that’ll suck water out of incoming line and blow out pump. Most of this stuff you should be doing anyway so the only thing different is shutting off water flow, disconnecting QC at pump and turning over engine. Total time 15-30 seconds. That’ll get you down into single digits. If you need to drain tank, most everyone has that already that already. If not you should. Remember if you have a low lying hose, may need to unscrew top of water filter and most of that will run off and if there’s just a tad of water left in it, will have room to expand.
Don’t forget to turn water back on when you go to restart your machine next time. Ask me how I remember to do that, lol.
Also if you have an injector bypass, make sure water drained from your loop in it, if loop hanging down.
I agree, but realistically may be hard for someone starting out to do, but if you look hard enough, you can usually find something cheap for a few months. Offer a friend a couple hundred/mo to put in one side of their garage or something.
All great points @Racer. I have a 4gpm that I’m removing - every day, I remove it from the truck using ramps and store it in the garage. Unfortunately the truck won’t fit in there.
So my whip line is disconnected when I’m not using it - and, it was disconnected during the cold temps. I also blew the lines out with an air compressor. I don’t think the freezing came from inside the hose. I do wipe the hoses down with a rag when I reel them up. My suspicion is that moisture found its way onto the hose reel with either rain, or morning dew prior to the freeze as it has been outside and unfortunately I haven’ had jobs each day. I know now to be more diligent though as I didn’t expect this to happen. This “molehill” cost me a few hundred bucks so lesson learned. Someday, I’ll make more money and be able to put the truck inside where it doesn’t get exposed, but you’re right - I haven’t been at it as long so don’t have the same resources as others, yet. Just thought I’d share the experience with anyone who wasn’t aware of it as I sure didn’t expect it.
Thank you for the points though, they are welcome.
I sure appreciate the thoughts you guys exchanged. Back about 1955 my folks had livestock on our place north of Albuquerque. The winters got so cold I had chores and the duty of walking the hose emptying the hose after filling water tanks and breaking ice. I still do this in north Arkansas living in a camper and getting some PW work now and then. Leave no room for doubt or your hoses will freeze up.
