Care & maintenance
How to protect your pump over winter
Pumps cope with cold fine. What they don’t cope with is freezing. Water expanding as it turns to ice can crack a pump housing, a fitting, or a pipe. If you get frosts where you are, a little winter prep saves an expensive spring surprise.
Why frost is the risk
It isn’t the cold that does the damage, it’s water freezing solid inside the pump or pipework and expanding as it does. That expansion can split a housing or a fitting. Anywhere the pump or exposed pipes can drop below zero is at risk.
If you’re using it through winter
- Keep the pump housed out of frost, in a pump shed, cover, or enclosure.
- Lag (insulate) any exposed pipework and the pump itself.
- On the hardest nights, a tap left barely dripping keeps water moving, and moving water is much harder to freeze.
- Make sure any drain points are clear.
If you’re leaving the property empty
- Switch off and isolate the pump.
- Drain the pump and the exposed pipework so there’s no water left to freeze.
- Open the priming plug and low drain points to let it empty, and leave a tap open.
- When you return, close up, re-prime, and start as normal.
A note on housing
A simple insulated housing that still lets air move solves most frost problems and keeps rain and insects out year-round. Just don’t seal a running pump in an airtight box, it needs some ventilation.
Safety: Isolate the power before draining or working on the pump. Never thaw a frozen pump with a naked flame.
The app tells you how it fared
After a cold snap, the Grewa app shows at a glance that your pump is online and running normally, so you can check it came through the frost without trekking out to the shed. And if a hard freeze ever does cause trouble, it flags the fault straight away rather than leaving you to find it in spring.
Common questions
Will my pump be OK in a normal cold winter?
Cold alone is fine. The risk is only when water inside it freezes solid. If it never gets below zero where the pump is, you have little to worry about; if it does, house or insulate it.
I am leaving my holiday place for winter, what’s the one thing to do?
Drain it. Switch off, isolate, and empty the pump and exposed pipes so there’s no water left to freeze. That single step prevents the most common frost damage.