Outside Tap Installation in Oundle
Out among the Oundle villages in particular, an outside tap is the sort of thing you never think about until the day you need one and it isn't there. Hauling a watering can through the kitchen, bucket-washing the car, running a hose from an upstairs window to fill the paddling pool — all of it stops the moment a garden tap goes on the wall.
The fitting itself is straightforward — the plumber tees into your internal cold supply, cores a neat hole through the external wall, and adds a double-check valve to prevent backflow, which the water regulations require. A tidy job that's done without turning your day upside down.
On most Oundle houses the tap lands on the kitchen wall or the garage return, but where the garden is larger the supply can be run on to a boundary wall or an outbuilding. An indoor isolation valve goes in every time so the run can be shut off and drained ahead of winter, with lagging wherever the pipe crosses an unheated void inside the property.
Oundle sits high on the Northamptonshire uplands, so a hard frost bites here and catches out outside taps left undrained — especially on the exposed new plots at Herne Park. 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 Oundle gardens around Southwick or Barnwell, 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.
