contractor success Protect Your Property With Proper Winterization Preparing your grounds for the freeze can help get you through the winter without blowing your budget. By: Mike Fitzpatrick T There are a number of cost-effective steps facilities managers and building owners can take to ensure that their properties and their grounds are sufficiently maintained through the winter and ready for springtime. Notable among these steps are an impor-tant duo: ■ Winterizing your irrigation systems ■ Protecting your vegetation, particularly the perennial flowering varieties. Ensuring that your irrigation systems are properly winterized is one of the most cost-effective ways to protect yourself from severe winter weather. Correctly winterizing an irrigation system will help increase the life of pipes, sprinklers, valves, pumps, fittings and other parts. Preparing your vegetation for the colder months is also an essential component of winterization. Doing so will not only help reduce your spring cleaning stresses, but it will also deter pests from attacking garden beds in search of shelter or a snack. Damming The Flow Although there can be significant costs associated with properly winterizing an irri-gation system, the benefits of doing so far outweigh those costs. A simple step to take, ensuring that pipes are properly drained and/or blown out can save an irrigation system from a host of potential problems. Irrigation pipes can crack or break eas-ily when residual water freezes because, in doing so, it expands in volume by roughly nine percent. Frozen pipes are likely to burst and leak or cause flooding when the ice melts — and, replacing burst pipes can be an extremely costly undertaking. Broken irrigation systems can, in turn, cause water damage to structures and landscapes. A majority of irrigation systems can be A burst pipe is an eas-ily avoidable situation as long as you make certain your irrigation system lines are dry. 38 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • January 2013
CMM – Archives Jan 2013: 38
