Water freezes, there’s no two ways around it. As the temperatures dip, ensuring your equipment is properly prepared to handle extreme weather is vital to maintaining your water trucks and keeping them operating at ultimate efficiency.
Not Draining Water Before a Freeze
Simply draining the water tank on your truck may not always do the job. To ensure maximum drainage of water, we recommend parking the equipment on an incline and draining the tank at that point. Maximizing the drainage keeps any water remaining to a minimum and the potential for damage to the equipment diminishes heavily alongside.
Not Utilizing the Petcock to Drain the Pump
A petcock is a small valve used in the control of liquid or gas. These valves can either be threaded valves controlled by a butterfly handle or, the more advanced version with a ball valve. Most water trucks in 2019 utilize ball valves in their petcocks. Using this valve to offload any remaining water keeps those smaller, more intricate pieces of equipment from getting damaged by frozen water expansion and compression. This is another layer of confidence in removing all of the possible water from your equipment. This may seem like a small and inconsequential step, but making a call for and installing repair parts in the dead of winter is nothing anyone wants to be doing.
Not Draining the Left Side Spray System
Neglecting to drain the water from your side spray system can lead to major problems with heavy freezes. The expansion of frozen water can wreak havoc on your water system. Properly draining your spray system keeps these maintenance issues from arising. Most spray systems have drain valves at typical water collection areas to utilize the forces of gravity to remove the water from your spray system.
Not Draining the Water Cannon
Your water cannon holds water even when it is not in service. The amount of pressure and small pieces with potential to fail should be of concern to anyone operating or maintaining these pieces of machinery. To properly drain your Niece Equipment water cannon you will want to aim the turret nozzle to its highest point and open the turret valve and leave it open. At this point you will want to run through and make sure all of the valves have been exercised and all water should be removed from the system.
Winterizing Your Water Truck
Taking the steps above to ensure you’ve removed all of the remaining water from your equipment can keep your water truck in top condition for a very long time. We also have a full breakdown of winterizing your water truck if you would like more in depth information related to draining and maintaining your equipment. The most important thing to remember is to drain water from all compartments, tank, pumps, side-sprayers, hoses, etc. As always, should you run into a problem, our customer service team is available to call or email with questions or connect you with a mechanic who can assist.
