Insulating Your Water Pipes

Insulating water pipes offers several advantages. During winter months, where basements and crawl spaces can be cool, insulating your pipes prevents hot pipes from loosing heat.

In addition, during winter months in unheated basement and attic crawl spaces, insulating your pipes prevents them from outright freezing and bursting.

Insulating your pipes also helps during the summer months, particularly with cold water supply lines. Pipe insulation prevents cold water pipes from sweating during hot and humid summer days.

Insulating pipes is very easy to do. There are a number of pipe insulation products that you can find at any home improvement center.

The easiest to install and cheapest pipe insulation product available today is pre-split polyethylene insulation.

To install it cut it to the desired length, spread it at its seam and slide it over the pipes. Finally peel back the protective paper covering at the slit and then just gently press the edges together to get a tight seal.

When installing over corners, it is best to use two pieces. Cut each abutting end of pipe insulation at 45 degree angles before installing. The result between the two pieces when installed will be a nice 90 degree corner.

With all seams, however, you’ll want to use reinforced foam insulating tape to ensure tightly insulated seams. Wrap the seams by spinning the tape around each bend making sure to create overlapping spirals in the process.

Here's information about "Preventing Water Pipe Condensation" forwarded to me By Mark J. Donovan.

Water pipe condensation can be both a simple nuisance and a real problem depending upon where and what the sweating pipes are dripping on. Condensation occurs when warm humid air comes in contact with cold pipes. The moisture in the warm air condenses and forms small water droplets on the pipes.

Sweating pipes is commonly seen in basements during hot humid summer days, particularly if the cold water faucets have been used a lot during the day. The condensed water often ends up dripping off the pipes and onto the floor of the basement.

This can be a real problem if the water is dripping on a basement ceiling, finished flooring, furniture or other valuable items. Even if it simply drips on the concrete basement slab it forms green stains if the pipes are made from copper.

Fortunately there is a simple solution for preventing water pipe condensation or sweating pipes. Insulation. By insulating pipes no condensation can occur on them, thus eliminating potential water damage.

The insulation prevents contact between the warm humid air and the cold pipes, thus eliminating the possibility of condensation forming on the pipes.

Besides polyethylene pipe foam insulation you can also use fiberglass insulation jackets and elastomeric thermal pipe insulation. Both will prevent condensation, however both are typically more expensive than polyethylene foam insulation, and require a bit more effort to install.

Fiberglass insulation jackets are firmer and are more ideal for very long straight stretches of pipe. They are installed exactly in the same way as the pipe foam insulation. One advantage to them is that they can be painted.

Elastomeric thermal pipe insulation is typically more expensive than the other two types of foam insulation and is meant for more extreme temperature environments, e.g. air conditioning pipes. One additional advantage of this type of insulation is that it is naturally mold resistant.

Thanks to Mark for being so helpful.

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