Our home builder provided strong warnings that homeowners in winter must turn off the water supply to outside faucets to prevent them from freezing, which can cause plastic pipes to burst inside outside walls. You must turn off a valve inside your home, then leave the outside valve open until spring.

It was easy to find one valve ~ it was under my guest bath sink. Oddly, there are two sinks in my guest bath and my outside shut-off valve is in the sink farthest from the outside wall (see photo below).

However, I couldn’t find the shut off valve for the hose faucet outside of my garage. After a lot of searching, I found it was hiding in the garage plumbing below my instant hot water heater, where there were many other valves to confuse me. So I called the plumber to ask which valve, and they said it would have a label tag attached to it, but that tag was hard to see. I finally located it, as shown in the photo above.

In addition to shutting off these valves, you need to remove the garden hose outside and open that outside valve, so any water in the pipe can expand during freezing weather instead of bursting the pipe.