It's mid-October which means temperatures are quickly dropping and it's time to start preparing for the changing of the seasons. 

Considering the year we've had (thanks, 2020), a lot of folks are looking to escape the city and enjoy their cottage in the coming winter months. Others will be closing up their vacation property as usual, with plans to reopen in the spring. 

If you own a cottage or cabin, are you planning on staying at or staying away from it this winter?

Staying at the cottage in the summer is one thing, keeping it open in the winter is an entirely different matter! Whether you plan to keep your cottage open year-round or close it up for the season, you’ll need to understand how to winterize it in order to keep from inconveniencing your family and to eliminate frozen water damage to your water filtration system.

If you’re a cottage owner, home owner, plumber, or work in the water filtration industry, this Winterizing Water Filtration live stream video and checklist is for you! 

For families that are planning on staying away from the city and escaping to their cottage or cabin for the winter, you may need to make some changes to your water filtration system to make sure it doesn’t become damaged from freezing. 

Here are Gary the Water Guy's pro tips on what you need to do to eliminate damage from freezing to your water filtration system. 

IF STAYING AT COTTAGE DURING WINTER:

• All exposed piping needs to be insulated and protected to keep them from freezing. If your unit is in an insulated basement or crawlspace, that is best. If not, you can build a small room around where your water filtration equipment and pipes are and have a small heater in it to prevent freezing. 
  
  
• Protect your drain lines. If you have any water filtration equipment that backwashes (water softener, iron filter), make sure the drain line is protected from freezing if it goes outside. The easiest fix for this is to connect the drain line to your septic system to prevent it from freezing or bursting.
  
  
• Install a generator. If this is your first winter at the cottage, the possibility of power outages due to frigid weather, falling trees and downed power lines is likely. Make sure you have your water filtration equipment, your UV light, and your pumps all connected to a generator. 
  
  
• If you draw water from a lake or the water line connecting to your home is very shallow, you'll need to heat that water line to prevent it from freezing. 
  
  

IF STAYING AWAY FROM COTTAGE FOR WINTER:

• 
  Shut off the power going to your hot water tank if closing your cottage for the winter. 
  
  
• The day of draining the cottage, plan some extra time to drain all the water from your pipes. This will take longer than you think it does so allow yourself enough time to carry this through!
  
  PRO TIP: Before you begin, make sure you have water available to you to use during the day - for drinking, washing, etc. (water jug, water bottles) 
  
  
• Shut off the breaker to the pump. If you're not going to be at the cottage/cabin during the winter months, make sure you shut the water OFF. Flip the breaker on the pump or on the valve. Make sure you leave your UV light ON!
  
  
• Open all the faucets in the whole cottage and let the water drain out. 
  
  
• Connect a compressor to the water system in the cottage to blow all the water out of the pipes. Set the compressor to 30 psi and connect the drain hose to the washing machine hot water supply to blow through. To the cold water supply, hook up the hose that will empty the water outside. 
  
  
• Bypass any Iron Filter, Water Softener, Tannin Filter. 
  
  
• If you have any Filter Housings, remove them, unscrew them and empty out. Put filter housings back on with no filters inside. 
  
  
• If you have a mini rack or 3-stage Ultraviolet Disinfection System, remove the filter housings, unscrew, remove the filters, and drain the water out by unscrewing the drain plug at bottom. Put filter housings back on. Unplug.
  Be sure to leave IN the UV lamp and the sleeve because you'll need to make that secure. 
  
  

  TIP: Ultraviolet disinfection winterizing is also covered further in this video.

• Open the cold water line. With the compressor pressurized, open drain line via hot tap. Air will burst through and push out water. Once you're just getting air out (no water), shut off the compressor. 
  
  
• Open every fixture/faucet in the cottage all the way on cold and hot taps to blow out water. 
  
  
• If you have a rinser at kitchen sink or handheld shower wand, make sure that's being drained also. Also keep in mind other things that use water, such as a sauna or outside shower. Don't forget to check your bunkies or outbuildings for things that use water also!
  
  
• If you have a dishwasher, set that to RINSE and hit START. Once blows out the water, cancel cycle and leave door slightly ajar.
  
  
• If you have an ice maker, clear and drain that out. 
  
  
• 
  Drain bathtubs and toilets last. Hold down the handle for 10 seconds then let go. Turn off valve and leave tank off. 
  
  
• Drain hot water tank. Open spigot at bottom of pressure tank. Since compressor is still pushing air through pipes, open valve after pressure tank base to let a little air out. Leave drain valve open at bottom of pressure tank -- but make sure you remember that it's open when you come back in the spring and close it first!
  
  
• Disconnect compressor and hoses at this point. Blow out washing machine. 
  
  
• Flush all water out of drains and overflows on your sink. The easiest way to do that is to use the compressor inside your house. See my pro tip (21:45 timestamp) using the base of a rubber plunger to blow water out of your drains! 
  
  
• Mop out any water in toilets with a sponge then put plumbing antifreeze in all your toilets, drains and shower stalls. (23:40 timestamp)
  
  
• If you have a Reverse Osmosis (RO) Drinking Water System, protect your investment by draining it, disconnecting it and taking it back home or somewhere warm for the winter. They are almost impossible to winterize! (24:47 timestamp)
  
  
• Water Softeners and Iron Filters are fairly straightforward for winterizing. (24:47 timestamp) Check out this great video that goes into details on the whole process! 
  
  
• If you have a jet pump drawing water from a well or lake at the cottage, you need to remove the drain plug and let water drain out. Add RV plumbing antifreeze to the pump case. If source is lake water, disconnect it and pull out water line, then remove foot valve and store indoors for winter time.
  
  If you have a submersible pump, it stays in bottom of well or lake for the winter.
  
  

• In the spring, you'll then reverse the procedure! (33:51 timestamp)

As you can see, Gary the Water Guy's step-by-step video live stream is extremely helpful for walking you through how to prep your cottage or cabin for the freezing temperatures ahead. 

Have questions? Check out our YouTube channel for more great how-to videos on tips, tricks, maintenance and troubleshooting of your water treatment equipment from Gary the Water Guy. 

Transcript for Video Below

Gary The Water Guy:
Winter's coming and it's playing some glitches on us today. We're talking about winterizing that cottage. Now, whether you're staying or whether you're staying away from the cottage this winter, that's what we're talking about tonight. Ton of information for you. Got a little bit of a rough start, but we're a hundred percent back online now, so please bear with us. Lots of great information, definitely be worth your while. It's coming to you right now.

Gary The Water Guy:
Hi. I'm Gary The Water Guy and I simplify water filtration to help you conquer crappy water for your family. A little bit thrown off here today because we're having problems, some glitches, but hopefully they're all resolved now. Anyway, we got a ton of information for you today. Again, we're talking about a lot of folks are planning on staying at their cottage this year. This might be their first year that they've decided to do that and they need to know how to handle that. A lot of first-time cottage owners out there. Again, they're looking for how to winterize that cottage. Again, whether you're staying or whether you're staying away from the cottage, whether you're a do-it-yourself-er, you're seasoned at closing down the cottage, it'll be great tips and tricks I'll be presenting today, so definitely bear with us.

Gary The Water Guy:
Whether you're watching this live or whether you're going to be watching the replay on YouTube, again, ton of information. The advantage of watching live, of course, is that you can submit your comments, and that way I can tailor the presentation to the folks that are watching. When you do give us a comment, then I'll flash it up on the screen like that, just like Gary The Water Guy did a little bit earlier and you can check it out.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, so we're going to be moving along here. I do have some notes that I'm going through here. Like I say, this year more than any other year, folks have been deciding to stay at the cottage, getting out of the city, and that kind of thing. Staying at the cottages in the summertime is one thing, but staying through the winter is something different, so there's a checklist and some things that you may want to check off to make sure that you're ready for that. Of course, I'll also be talking about staying away from the cottage and what you need to do to get the cottage to winterize it.

Gary The Water Guy:
If you're staying at the cottage, of course, the obvious thing is you need to protect all the pipes and to keep them from freezing. Now, the best thing to do is have an insulated basement. Not everybody has that, especially cottages, right? You may have a crawlspace. Again, if that crawlspace is insulated, that's a really good thing and that'll help keep those pipes from freezing. If you don't have that, you can always build a small room around where your water filtration equipment is, where the pressure tank is, where the pump is, like I say, where your filters are, et cetera, try to insulate the floor. Then all you need is a small heater in those areas, something like this, for example. This works really well. Like I say, you don't need a lot of heat in that area, just enough to keep the pipes from freezing, so that's definitely something that you want to check out.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, here. All exposed plumbing needs to be insulated, so if you have plumbing hanging below your house, obviously, you're going to have to insulate that to keep the cold from getting to it. Now, one thing you have to be careful of is an exterior wall. Whoops. If you have a pipe up against an exterior wall and then you can't insulate on the warm side of the pipe, you have to insulate on the cold side of the pipe, right, between the pipe and the wall because otherwise the frost will freeze that pipe, so you have to be careful of that.

Gary The Water Guy:
Now, any water filtration you have that backwashes, whether it's a water softener, an iron filter, or something like that, what you need to do is you need to make sure that drain line, if it goes outside, that you need to protect it from freezing, okay? Because in the summertime, if it goes outside, it's not a big deal, right? It's not going to freeze. But in the wintertime, it definitely is a big deal, so you need to make sure that that line is. What do you do with that line? It's best to connect it up to your septic system and just have it go in there because if it goes outside, like I say, it'll freeze, or you can even get puddles forming outside, and then it builds up, snow builds up, et cetera, and then it freezes and it could burst either outside of the cottage or inside of the cottage or cabin and you definitely don't want to be dealing with that. All right, so watch for any pipes that are inside the cabin or cottage that are mounted on exterior walls. We talked about that.

Gary The Water Guy:
One thing you need to consider is about getting a generator. If this is your first winter at the cottage, we do have power outages at the cottage, right? Especially in the wintertime, trees fall down, things like that, so a generator will definitely help, but make sure that you've got everything hooked up to the generator. Make sure you got your water filtration, make sure you've got your water pump hooked up, make sure you got your ultraviolet light, things like that, all connected to the generator so that if you do have a power failure, the generator is powering the correct things, right? I got a little picture here of a generator. This happens to be the one that I have in my home. That part of it doesn't matter, but like I say, that's a good choice for you.

Gary The Water Guy:
Now, if you draw water from a lake, okay, or if the water line coming from your well to your home is very shallow, then you need to heat that water line, so you can use something like this. This is a heated line that goes inside it and what it does, it's powered from within the cottage and it keeps that line from freezing. Definitely keep that in mind, especially if you've never wintered at the cottage before, because it's going to be different and you want to make sure that you're going to be ready for that, especially, like I say, if you're drawing water from a lake, right?

Gary The Water Guy:
One thing I always like to stress is if you're not at the cottage or at the cabin or any vacation property, shut the water off, okay? You can shut it off a couple different ways. You can either flip a breaker on the pump and shut the water off that way or you can shut it off with a valve. I have a valve somewhere. Right here. All right, so this is a ball valve, okay? This is open. Just to make sure it focuses on that. This is open. When the handle is in line with the pipe, the pipe would be going this way, and this way is closed. Very cheap insurance is when you're away from your cottage or cabin is to shut off the water.

Gary The Water Guy:
You can also shut it off at the pump. How would you shut it off at the pump? You just shut it off with a breaker. I got some pictures of that right here, mkay? One thing you can do is shut it off with the breaker. Now, the image that you're seeing here right now is showing the person shutting it off at the main, but hopefully your breaker panel is labeled with all the different breakers on it so that you can shut it off selectively, you can shut off the pump, et cetera. But you do want to things like your ultraviolet light and that you'll want to leave that on 24/7, so that's why it's important to decide which items you're going to be shutting off. Whoops. Sorry about that.

Gary The Water Guy:
Okay, so that's if you're planning on staying at the cottage, right? You need to insulate it. You need to make sure you've got heat on. You need to make sure that any water lines going outside are protected from freezing and if you've got a shallow line or are you drawing water from a lake, that you have a heated water line.

Gary The Water Guy:
Okay, so let's move on to if you're planning on staying away from the cottage this winter. In other words, you're going to drain the whole system. Okay, so obviously, what you need to do is you're going to be draining a cottage, right? The first step in draining the cottage always starts the night before. The night before, what you need to do is you need to shut off the power going to your hot water tank, right, because that hot water tank, the elements inside need to cool and you don't want to just shut them off and drain the tank right away because what you could do, you could actually damage those heating elements.

Gary The Water Guy:
If you're not sure what I'm talking about, here's a picture of a basic hot water tank. Yeah, so you can see by this image here... Whoops, somehow you don't have me there, do you? All right, great. Okay, so you can see a picture of a basic hot water tank and you can see where the cold water goes in, you can see where the hot water goes out, but you can see those heating elements in there, right? You want to make sure that those heating elements which are normally in water are not out of water because when they're hot, they could become warped and they could become damaged, okay? All right, great.

Gary The Water Guy:
Moving right along. The day of draining the cottage, you need to prepare ahead and plan ahead, right, because remember, the goal is to remove all of the water from everywhere to keep it from freezing, right? But it's going to take a while. Especially if this is the first time you've done it, don't think you're going to do it in 10 or 15 minutes because you're probably not and you're not going to do a very good job of it, right, so what you need to do is you need to plan some extra time to do that. A couple of things you need to plan ahead for: You need to have some water ahead, either for drinking water or to wash your hands and things like that, that's one thing you need to do to plan ahead.

Gary The Water Guy:
You need to move the aerators, as you'll be loosening up a lot of stuff. What do I mean by "aerators"? I'm talking about the air raters on the faucets. I got a faucet back here. Great. This is an aerator. What I'm talking about is these things here, okay? What you can do is you can grab these with some plumber's pliers or something like that, unscrew these and take them off because if you don't, you're going to be loosening up a lot of stuff from the water and it's going to be coming out the faucet here and it's going to be clogging up this aerator very quickly and it's going to be very frustrating for you, so remove all the aerators throughout the whole cottage before you begin.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, and like I say, plan for the process take longer than you think it will, because it always does. Remember that every cottage or cabin is different. I'm presenting some basic ideas here today about winterizing your cottage or cabin. But remember, every cottage or cabin is different, so some of the things are going to relate to your cottage and some of the things or not, so keep that in mind going forward.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, so the next thing you're going to want to do is shut off the breaker to the pump, so the pump's off, and then you're going to want to shut off the water supply to the cabin after the pressure tank. Okay, I've got a picture here of a pressure tank, I think. Let me just show you that, what I'm talking about. Oh, boy. There. All right, so that's what I'm talking about. That's a pressure tank. At the base of the pressure tank, the water line comes out and then feeds to the whole cottage, okay, and as the water line leaves the pressure tank, then you're going to have a shutoff valve, oh, just like this one here, okay? You're going to have shutoff valve like this and what you're going to want to do is you want to turn it off. Again, turn it perpendicular to the direction of the pipe.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, so once you've done that, then... Where was I here? Okay. All right. You remove the... Right, okay. Right, okay. Great. Then what you're going to want to do is you're going to open up all the faucets in the whole cottage and just let the water run and let the water drain out. After you've done that, then what you're going to do is you're going to connect a compressor to the water system in the cottage to blow out all the water. Now, the best place to come to connect the compressor is here, so if you have a washer, a washing machine in there and you have a connection, something like this, or any kind of connection of the hoses that go to the washing machine, this is the best place to connect to it.

Gary The Water Guy:
Let me go back here. What you're going to... Shutoff breaker, yeah. What you're going to want to do is, first of all, you're going to set the compressor to 30 PSI, and then you're going to connect the drain hose to the washing machine supply... Sorry. Yes, you're going to connect, sorry, to the hot supply. In other words, you're going to undo the hose, that's the hot water line going to the washing machine, and you're going to connect to that. What are you going to connect to that? You're going to connect something like this right here. Hopefully, the camera's going to pick that up, focus in on that. This is just a fitting that you can cobble together yourself. This is for the compressor and this is going to be to hook up to the hose. You can see it's just a few little fittings I put together. I bought these at Home Depot or Home Hardware, I can't remember which, and then you just connect this together.

Gary The Water Guy:
What you're going to do is you're going to screw that onto that hot connection that's normally used for the washing machine and that's where you're going to connect up your compressor. All right, so what do I mean by "compressor"? Just something like this. You don't want to get too small of a compressor. You want to make sure it's got a fairly big tank so that it's not running all the time and trying to keep up to maintain that 30 PSI that you need, but you want to make sure it's big enough to get the job done, obviously, right?

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, great. Oh, and then to the cold supply, the cold water supply that would normally be going to the washing machine, that's where you're going to hook up a hose and you're going to run that outside because you're going to be blowing through the hot connection and blowing out of the cold connection.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, so you're going to bypass any water softener, iron filter, tannin filter, or backwashable filter. I've got Frankenstein here. What I mean by "bypassing" is these valves over here, right, you're going to turn them to bypass so that no water is flowing through these guys and it's going to flow past them, all right? I'll put the Frankenstein over there. Move on here.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right. Are you going to remove any filter housings? Any of these filter housings that you have, okay, what you're going to do is you're going to remove them, you're going to unscrew them, and you're going to dump all the water out and you're going to dump the filters that are inside here out, too, and then you're going to put the housings back on with no filter inside.

Gary The Water Guy:
Now, if you have a mini rack or a three-stage ultraviolet system like this guy over here, then again, what you're going to do is you're going to unscrew these filter housings and you're going to remove the filters and drain the water out, but leave in the UV lamp and the sleeve, because you're going to need to make that secure, and then you're going to, again, put the filter housing back on here as you get ready to blow out all the water. But of course, you've dumped all the water out of the filter housings, right? You're going to unplug the ultraviolet system.

Gary The Water Guy:
Then with the compressor, you're going to pressurize... Sorry, with the compressor pressurized, open the faucet for the drain line first, okay? You're not going to have the faucet open from the hot line at this point, you're just going to open the faucet from the cold line because that's going to go to the outside hose, so you're going to open that first, and then you're going to slowly open up the faucet that would, like I say, where you've now connected up the compressor to the system and you're going to start forcing air through, so make sure the drain hose is secured because it's going to whip around, so you want to make sure that it's secure so the water's draining out. Initially, you get a full blast of water, but then you're getting the bursts of air through, and then at the end, you're just going to be getting air. Once you just get air, shut off the water line, going to the drain hose. Once you're just getting air, then shut off the water to the drain hose, okay?

Gary The Water Guy:
Then with the compressor still connected and air in everywhere, then you're going to go to the cottage and you're going to open every fixture. Every faucet that you have, like this one here, you're going to make sure that you open it, okay? You're going to open it and you're going to open it all the way on the cold side and then you're going to turn it and open it all the way on the hot side and all the water's going to be blowing out, okay, so that's an important thing that you need to do.

Gary The Water Guy:
There's some things that may not be obvious that you need to do, things like the rinser at the kitchen sink, if you have a wand in the shower, a hose with a wand at the shower that you want to use, these are all things that you need to think about, opening everything that uses water in the cottage, right?

Gary The Water Guy:
Let's just see if we're getting any comments here today. People probably aren't too happy with me with the problems I had initially, but let me just see if anything's coming up here. Oh, here. Whoops. No, it doesn't look like we're getting any comments so far. I can see why, because like I say, we had some problems getting going, so maybe there's some comments going. But anyway, we're still live here and thanks for bearing with me. Like I say, lots of great information here. I really appreciate your comments if you can put them in. I really like to answer your questions. After the live stream, you can also check it out, and I'll answer any questions that you have, any stuff that you missed during this whole process.

Gary The Water Guy:
Okay, so look around for unusual things that you may have in your cottage that to use water, things like a sauna, or things like that, anywhere like that, so you need to open it up and you need to make sure so that it blows all the water out, okay? Check for an outside shower. That's a common thing that cottages or cabins have, right? You want to make sure that that's working and then go to any bunkies that you have, any outbuildings, make sure, again, that you're blowing all the water out of all of those areas.

Gary The Water Guy:
Dishwasher. With the dishwasher, what you do is you set it to rinse and then you press Start. What that does is it blows the water out and you'll actually see it blowing out. Once it's blown out, just press Cancel so it can finish the cycle, and then just leave the door slightly open. Ice maker, clear away some ice. The unit calls for ice. Then again, you'll see the water blowing out of there with the air. Bathtub, run the faucet, and then the shower, both hot and cold. Like I say, if you have one of those wands, make sure you don't have the loop, because again, water'll be stuck in the bottom of that loop, so either put it down or open up the wand to blow out all the water.

Gary The Water Guy:
Toilets, do them last, but when you do them, keep the tank on top, hold down the handle for 10 seconds, and then let go. Once you've done that, you'll hear lots of air hissing out, so make sure you shut off the toilet at the bottom and then leaves the tank off over the wintertime, that way whatever little bit of water that's left in there, it'll just evaporate, and then you don't have to worry about that. All right, so here's a little bit more information about the toilet and just some of the information I was talking about in terms of how the toilet works so that you can get all the water out of it going forward, right?

Gary The Water Guy:
Okay, then what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to drain the hot water tank. Once you've done that, then what you're going to do is you need to open up the spigot at the bottom of the pressure tank because you'll want to drain out that pressure tank, and then because you still got air in the cottage, what you can do is open up that valve that's just after the pressure tank just a little bit to force some air through, to force some water out of the base of the pressure tank, so definitely have a look at that. If the pressure tank's in another building, obviously, you have to go over there and do that. Then leave the drain valve open from the bottom of the pressure tank. You just got to make sure you remind yourself that in the spring, when you start everything up, that that's one of the first things you close, right?

Gary The Water Guy:
Disconnect the compressor and all the hoses at this point, open all the faucets, and then you would connect up to the back of the washing machine and blow out the washing machine, put it through a cycle, both warm and cold to blow out the water that's inside the washing machine. Okay, here. Let me show you this. At the base of your pressure tank, you'll have this, what's called a "tee pack." Where that red handle is where you would drain the pressure tank, okay, so just be aware of that.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, so then the next thing that you're going to want to do is flush all the water out of the drains, okay? The easiest way to do that is, again, using your compressor, but now you bring your compressor into the house. Then what you do is you take a plunger like this and you unscrew this part of the plunger and then you poke a hole right through the middle here and then what you do is you get one of these guns for a compressor, okay, and you hook this up to your compressor and then you push this inside here and then you use this to cover up the drains in your cottage with the air on to blow the water out.

Gary The Water Guy:
What you're doing is you're blowing the water out of the P-traps, and of course, all the plumbing. What's a P-trap? If you go underneath your cottage, you'll see these set up all over for the drainage, okay? This is a P-trap. What you'll want to do is with that air, you're going to blow through here and you're going to blow the water out of this P-trap because you need to get all that water out because otherwise it just sits in the bottom here and is going to freeze and it's going to burst the P-trap. You definitely don't want to do that, all right? Someplace else that you have to do is the overflows on, whoops, the overflows on the sink. There, the overflows on the sink, you're going to want to make sure you do those, too. That's what we've got circled here in this image.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, so we'll get back here. Okay, great. Moving right along here. You want to blow out the sink overflows, you want to blow out all the water inlets. You can use this same device, right, to blow out the jets in the inlet. If you have a jetted tub, you want to blow out the water that way. Then you need to mop out any of the water that's been left in the toilet because there'll be a little bit left in the bottom. You can use a sponge, something like this, okay? These things work really well to mop out that water.

Gary The Water Guy:
Then what you need to do is you need to put antifreeze in all the drains, okay? You need to go around. The antifreeze I'm talking about is stuff like this. This is typically used for RVs, but this one actually says, whoops, plumbing antifreeze right on it, so that's what you're going to be using. You're going to start going around and you're going to add two cups of antifreeze to the toilet tank and enough to cover the hole at the bottom in the toilet. You'll see that there's a depression at the bottom of the toilet, but there's also a hole at the back, right, so you want to raise it up enough so that covers that hole at the back. Then you're going to pour a cup of the same antifreeze down every drain and two cups in the shower stall because the drain there is larger. Winterizing appliances. A dishwasher, for example, you're going to pour enough in the bottom that just covers the holes at the bottom. As I mentioned earlier, you can leave the dishwasher door open slightly, and then you're going to remove the...

Gary The Water Guy:
Okay, so reverse osmosis drinking water systems, let's talk about those. Reverse osmosis systems basically consists of two components. There's the manifold, which is back here, okay, so what's your best to do with this, you're best to disconnect this and then take it somewhere in the wintertime where it's going to be warm because these are almost impossible to winterize unless you totally disassemble them, so you just disconnect it and take it back. I've got a really good video on how to connect and disconnect quick-connect fittings. Those are the ones that these systems use, so you can check that out and it'll show you how easily it is to disconnect that.

Gary The Water Guy:
I still recommend, though, before you disconnect that reverse osmosis system that you drain it first, okay? That's an important thing. In other words, open up the faucet, let the water run till it no longer comes out of the system anymore, and then go from there. It's the same with the reverse osmosis tank, which is here. Again, you've drained, it already. Disconnect the tubing from it and then just make sure the valve is open and that all the water's drained out. Now, if there's a problem with this reverse osmosis tank, maybe it's lost its pre-charge, if you lift it up, if it's quite heavy, that means it's full of water. If it's full of water, then you need to pump that up. You can just do that with the valve open, just add some water to this Schrader valve down here and that'll blow all the water out of the tank.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, moving on. Okay, so UV filters and cartridges, we talked about opening those up and leaving them open for the winter. Now, UVs are always best when they're mounted vertically, but you need to make sure you're getting all the water out. If you have a UV like this one, like this Safe Water 10 here, it's great because at the bottom, you'll see there's a drain plug, okay, so you just unscrew that drain plug and that'll drain this whole cylinder out because as you can see, even if you undid this connection at the bottom down here, okay, you still wouldn't get all the water out. Again, that's one of the reasons I always recommend installing your UV vertically, right?

Gary The Water Guy:
If you have one of these smaller UVs that you use just for your drinking water at one faucet, then what you need to do, you need to be very careful with these ones. Obviously, you're going to unscrew these filter housings and drain the water out, but you also need to move the ultraviolet light bulb from inside here. Very important. Then just make sure you're draining all of the water out because as you can see with a scenario like this where you've got the in and the outlet at the top, water can sit at the bottom, and I've had several of these where customers didn't realize that and over the wintertime, they froze solid and they actually burst and we had to replace these stainless steel cylinders, so make sure you drain that one thoroughly. Or you can always disconnect these ones, right, and take them home over the winter and store them, yeah, in a warm place. All right, and of course, the UV would be unplugged at this stage, right?

Gary The Water Guy:
Then winterizing water softeners, iron filters, et cetera, they're very straightforward. I've got a great video on that. Let me just see right here. That's the thumbnail for it. You can check that out. I've got a link in the description down below that I'll be putting in there, so you can definitely check that out. It goes through the whole process. But basically, it's quite straightforward. What you do is you put the unit in regeneration, so you press down the Regen button, hold it down for five seconds, and it goes into regeneration. Once it's in regeneration, then you bypass the unit. This is already in bypass here.

Gary The Water Guy:
Once you've bypassed it, you've released all the pressure inside, so then what you can do is you just advance it through all the cycles to get it back into service position. Once you've done that, then you just disconnect it. The best way to do it is to disconnect it right here. Between the valve and the bypass, disconnect it there. Once you've disconnected it from there, then on the inside, you can connect it up to your compressor and you can blow all the water out of it with the compressor.

Gary The Water Guy:
Again, I've made some fittings. In that video that I showed you the link to, or sorry, the thumbnail from a little bit earlier, it goes into the whole procedure and it also talks about how you can actually put together those fittings, but I'll just show you quickly. This is one here. Basically, what we've done here is we've taken the connection kit that you would normally use to connect the water softer to the plumbing, you've gotten a separate one just to create this fitting here, and then, again, you've connected it up to a fitting where you can hook up the compressor, okay, so you do this on the inlet side and then hook this up to the compressor.

Gary The Water Guy:
For the outlet side, again, you can do something very similar, like this, connect it up, put a hose on this end, and you're going to blow the water in, you're going to blow the water out of here, and then you're going to get all the water out of it. Now, you don't have to use a compressor to get all the water out. You can actually lay it down on quite a steep angle to get all the water out. It's more difficult, but either way, you'll never get a hundred percent of the water out, so once you've gotten 90% of the water out, then you need to leave it laying horizontally over the wintertime. Yes, it's going to freeze, but it's not going to burst if it's horizontal. Then in the spring, you just put it back up.

Gary The Water Guy:
The other thing you need to do with these systems is you need to open up the injector, so if you look up on top here, this is where the injector is up here, so you just open that up, and with a sponge or something like that, mop out the water in there, or with a compressor, you can blow out the water that's in there. You can put a little bit of RV antifreeze inside there so that it's good to go. All right, great. Then the holes, when you've laid it horizontally, you can just plug them with cloth or something like that. Just want to keep the mice out of over the wintertime. Great. Got that.

Gary The Water Guy:
I've also got a video on specifically how to do iron filters, like this one is set up here. No, this one is set up as a water softener. The iron filter is slightly different than the water softer, but not a whole lot, but you can check that out if you have your iron filters, et cetera, to do those. Again, I've got another great video on how to winterize ultraviolet disinfection systems, and again, it talks about the nuances and some of the things you have to be careful of when you're doing that, so again, I definitely encourage you to check that out.

Gary The Water Guy:
Jet pumps. With a jet pump... Oh, first of all, what's a jet pump, Gary? I'll show you a picture of it here. This is a jet pump. Basically, there's two kinds of pumps, right, that you see in cottages. One is a submersible pump that's at the bottom of the well or at the bottom of the lake that draws the water up, or if you have a pump that looks something like this in your cottage or cabin, this is what's called a "jet pump." To winterize those, you remove the drain plug and let the unit drain. Actually, I've got a... Let the unit drain, add one to two cups of RV antifreeze to the pump case so that the pump, obviously, doesn't break, and if water source is lake water, disconnect it and pull out the water line, remove the foot valve and store it indoors over the wintertime. Submersible pumps, they stay in the bottom of the well or at the bottom of the lake for the wintertime.

Gary The Water Guy:
Let me just see. Here, I've got a great picture here that shows some of the different parts of the pump so you can identify it, which ones we're talking about here, the priming plug at the top, and of course, the drain plug at the bottom. You want to drain the water out, put the drain plug back in, and then fill it up with RV antifreeze, so again, it does not freeze.

Gary The Water Guy:
All right, great, so that's it. Pretty much in the spring now, you reverse the procedure, right? Your filters, you're going to put new filters in, you're going to reinstall the reverse osmosis system you took out, you're going to let it fill up, and you're going to flush out that first fill of water, so you're going to get rid of that and then go from there. You're going to reinstall the water filtration equipment. Again, you're going to stand it up, reconnect it. Again, those videos I showed you a little bit earlier there give you a lot more information about all of that.

Gary The Water Guy:
Make sure the drain plug is installed in the jet pump before you get it going. The shutoff valve I spoke about earlier at the base of the pressure tank, make sure that's closed before you set it up. You're going to need to prime and start that jet pump. It's a little beyond the scope of this video, but there's lots of great information about how you can do that. You're going to want to close all faucets, including the hot water tank before you start filling the water.

Gary The Water Guy:
Then when you start filling, make sure you check around to make sure you didn't miss anything. Again, when the pump starts running and you start filling up the whole system, just do it very, very slowly at first, that way if you do have a leak, you can catch it really early and get it fixed before you go up any further. Start up the water filtration equipment. You're going to want to backwash that first and get it going, and of course, once everything is full and especially the hot water tank is full and you've purged some of the air out of the hot water tank, then you can start it up and get that hot water going.

Gary The Water Guy:
Thanks for watching. Again, I hope you stuck it out with me here today. We definitely had some glitches earlier on and I'm going to work very hard to make sure that never happens again with our live streams here. I do publish a new video every week on YouTube 5:00 AM Eastern Time every Saturday morning. The only times I don't do that is when I do a live stream like this week, so this live stream, I'll be promoting it and publishing it this weekend so that you can check it out for more information. Lots of great information coming, lots of great videos coming. Definitely check it out. Thanks for watching. I really appreciate it and will look forward to seeing you next time.