Outside Tap Installation in Little Paxton
Outside taps get heavy use in Little Paxton — this is a village of gardens, allotments, dog walkers coming back off the Paxton Pits trails and cars that pick up half the Great North Road on the way home. An outside tap is one of those things you don't think about until you haven't got one. Washing the car with a bucket, dragging a hose through the kitchen, filling the paddling pool from the bathroom tap — it's a hassle. Getting one fitted is a quick job that makes life easier all year round.
On the 1970s estate houses the cold supply usually runs somewhere predictable, which makes an outside tap a tidy job rather than an exploratory one. Your plumber tees off your internal cold supply, drills through the wall, and fits the tap with a double check valve (backflow prevention — it's a water regulations requirement). It's a tidy job that doesn't disrupt your day.
Gardens backing onto the old gravel workings tend to be long, so where you want the tap and where the supply actually is are rarely the same place. Most Little Paxton properties suit an outside tap on the kitchen wall or garage side. For bigger gardens, we can run the pipe further to a tap on a boundary wall or outbuilding. An indoor isolation valve is always fitted so you can shut off and drain the run before winter, plus pipe lagging where it crosses any unheated voids inside the property.
Frost coming off the open Ouse floodplain catches exposed pipework here more readily than it does in a sheltered town centre street. Cambridgeshire winters aren't the harshest in the country, but cold snaps still catch out outside taps that haven't been properly drained down. Water sitting in the spout can freeze, expand, and split the brass body or the copper pipe behind the wall — usually first noticed when the next thaw produces a leak inside the kitchen wall. Your plumber always fits an isolation valve on the indoor side of the run so you can shut off and drain the supply before December, plus pipe lagging on the indoor run where it crosses unheated voids.
For larger Little Paxton gardens around Diddington or Paxton Mill, we can run the supply further down the side of the property to put the tap closer to where it's actually needed — near a vegetable patch, greenhouse, or boundary wall. We can also fit a hose union connector on the spout so a garden hose clips on without an adaptor, and double-tap blocks for properties that want one tap for the hose and a separate one for filling watering cans.
