Outside tap installation

An outside tap is one of the cheapest genuinely useful upgrades a Manchester house can have. Watering the garden, washing the car, rinsing muddy boots and bikes, filling a paddling pool in the two weeks of summer we get: all without dragging a hose through the kitchen window. Fitting one is a small, tidy job when done properly, and a slow-motion problem when done badly. We fit them properly, from £90, across Greater Manchester.

What a proper installation looks like

The tap on the wall is the visible part. The quality is in the three things behind it:

• A tee off your cold mains, made with proper fittings on a pipe that can take it, not a self-cutting clamp valve. Those clamp-on valves restrict the flow to a dribble and have a habit of weeping years later, hidden behind the kitchen units.
• An internal isolation valve, fitted inside the house on the branch to the tap. This is your winter switch. Shut it in November, open the outside tap to drain the stub of pipe, and frost has nothing to split.
• A double check valve, which is not optional. The water regulations require backflow protection on any outside tap, because a hose left dangling in a water butt or bucket can siphon contaminated water back into the drinking supply when the mains pressure drops. We fit one on every job as standard.

Then the hole through the wall, drilled cleanly, sleeved and sealed, with the tap mounted on a proper wall plate at a height a watering can actually fits under. It sounds obvious. We have seen enough taps mounted six inches off the floor to know it is not.

Where the tap goes, and what that costs

The price is mostly about the distance between your cold water pipe and the wall you want the tap on. The classic easy job is a kitchen sink on an outside wall: tee off under the sink, straight through the wall, done in about an hour, at the bottom of the price range.

Manchester housing throws up plenty of harder versions. In terraces around Withington, Burnage and Monton the kitchen is often in a rear offshoot with the supply entering at the front, so a longer run is needed. In newer estates the garage is sometimes the sensible route. Solid stone walls in older Saddleworth and Ramsbottom properties take longer to drill than brick. None of this is a problem, it just moves the price within the range, and we tell you the number before we start, not after.

If you want a second tap, front and back, or one at the greenhouse end of a long garden, we can run pipework to suit, buried or clipped and lagged depending on the route.

Winter, frost and the burst you do not see

The failure mode for outside taps in Manchester is not summer, it is January. Water trapped in the tap and the short pipe stub freezes, expands and splits something. Sometimes the tap body splays visibly. The worse version is a split just inside the wall that only shows itself on the thaw, quietly soaking the kitchen floor from behind the units. At that point you are reading our burst pipe repair manchester page instead of this one, and the fix costs a lot more than a tap.

Every installation we do is designed to make winterising trivial: isolation valve inside, drain the stub, one minute per year. If your existing tap has no isolation valve, retrofitting one is a quick job and much cheaper than the alternative. Unscrew the hosepipe in winter too; a connected hose traps water in the tap and is the single most common cause of frost damage we see.

Repairs and upgrades to existing taps

Not every job is a new install. We also repair and replace garden taps that drip, seize or have suffered a freeze, and the fixes overlap with ordinary tap repair manchester work: washers, reseating, or a straight swap of the bib tap where the body is past it. While we are there we check the installation behind the tap, because a surprising number of Manchester outside taps have no check valve and no isolation valve at all. Bringing one up to standard usually adds only a modest amount to a repair visit.

If the outside tap is part of a bigger under-sink sort-out, new appliance connections, isolation valves, waste work, our kitchen plumbing manchester service rolls it all into one visit, which is cheaper than doing them separately.

What it costs

Standard installations start from £90, including the tap, double check valve, isolation valve, drilling and testing. Longer runs and harder walls take it up to around £150. Repairs and replacements of existing taps are usually less. Everything is priced before work starts, and our plumber call out fee page explains how our pricing works generally.

Booked in, done in a morning

Outside tap work sits within the wider plumbing services manchester we provide across the city, and it is an easy job to slot in: most installs are done within a morning of arriving. We are based at Vantage Quay in the city centre and work throughout the areas we cover across Greater Manchester, from Salford and Bury down to Stockport and Wilmslow. Call 0161 533 0201, tell us roughly where your kitchen sink is relative to the back wall, and we can usually price the job on the phone.