M-D Building Products 04341 12 ft. Pipe Heating Cable

So far so good. I have only had this installed for a few weeks, but wanted to post since I think they may be either shipping cables that are slightly different or maybe they have switched to a newer model. In reading the reviews some reviews report that the lighted plug is on all the time and some report that the light comes on when the cable is actually heating. On the cable I received this year (2016) the light is ALWAYS on and seems only to indicate that the circuit is complete and the cable has power. In order to test my cable I held a bag of ice against the thermostat and was able to hear it kick on and get warm. I'd recommend doing this test before you install it to make sure you didn't receive a dud cable. It's much easier to test before installing rather than finding out you have a problem later and having to rip it out and return it. I plan to test it at least annually by icing the thermostat.UPDATE - it has been a year since I purchased and installed this cable. Before winter set in I climbed back in my crawlspace and removed the zipties that I used to mount the thermostat so I could test it with a bag of ice. Sure enough, once it got cool enough I heard a slight audible click and the cable warmed up. I reinstalled the thermostat with zipties and climbed back out. I'll do it again every year but so far so good.UPDATE - just did my annual test (11/2020) and my cable is still working flawlessly. That being said, my cable is exactly like the one pictured here (orange on plug side, heat shrink tubing on a T shaped thermostat, black cable on the heating side). I have read reviews and seen online that they are now selling a purple flat cable type of heat cable and I have no experience with that one.

Bought this short ( 3ft ) heating tape to prevent freezing of my homes anti-siphon valve for drip irrigation. Who would have thought this would be a problem here in Las Vegas?This heating tape seems to be high quality. I like the automatic thermostat which turns heat tape on below about 40 degrees and off when air temperature goes back up.I've replaced 2 valves over a 6 year span so I wanted a more predictable and effective solution than just plain insulation. I'm now using this heating tape secured to pipe and valve with self-fusing silicone tape. I think this is ideal because the silicone tape will hold up to weather, heat etc and it is stretchy which holds the heating tape intimately against the pipe and valve. This makes heat transfer more effective. Self-fusing silicone tape is the bomb and available here at Amazon. I also use an insulated pouch which fits loosely over the valve and pipes and helps retain the heat. I'm confident this arrangement will solve the freezing problem.

I used half inch pex, added hose connections on either end, placed this along the length of the hose and took pool noodles, cut them lengthwise and sliped them over the hose and heater cord, then wrapped it in tape at various intervals. It survived the winter and below zero temperatures without freezing.

I can recommend this product, but I had a problem that almost caused me to remove the heat tape with the insulation from my water line and return it, and that's not fun when it's cold outside. I wouldn't be surprised if some other people have had this problem, which is also a problem for the manufacturer and those selling the product. I assume the problem would exist with all of the other length heat tapes; they probably use this same thermostat.After installing the heat tape and insulation, I wanted to make sure it was working OK. I could have done this by watching the pilot light when it got cold, but I decided to use the "Kill a Watt" meter that I had purchased at Amazon about a year ago. (I highly recommend that product. It's relatively cheap, about $21. You plug it into a wall socket and then plug an electic appliance into it and it tells you the volts, amps, watts, power factor, kilowatt hours, etc.) I plugged the electric heat tape into the meter and I could see when the heat tape turned on and the watts it was drawing. (It was 19 to 20 watts by the way.) For one thing, by using the meter I didn't have to go outside to see the pilot light. Actually the pilot light is underneath my mobile home.The problem came when the temperature (where the heat tape was located) went down to a little below 30 degrees F on several occasions and the heat tape was not staying on. It was off quite a bit of the time. I wasn't anticipating that, and I thought the thermostat was probably defective. The instructions that came with the heat tape didn't prepare me for that. They mentioned some blinking for a while, but I thought the heat tape would be continuously on before the temperature dropped to 28 to 30 degrees.I don't think the thermostat is defective, and you certainly don't need for the heat tape to be on continuously when it is something like 28 to 30 degrees, but like I said, my first thought was that the thermostat was defective. Apparently when the thermostat first kicks on and the temperature isn't quite a bit colder than 30 degrees the flow of electricity warms up the thermostat a little and it kicks off for a while again.Fortunately I decided to monitor the heat tape for a while instead of removing it. Since then I have found that the colder it gets the more it stays on, and when it is cold enough it stays on all of the time. So far this year the temperature has dropped to 5 degree or so and I haven't had any problems with freezing water lines. Of course you have to insulate the water lines to recommended levels, remembering, for one thing, that this heat tape only uses some 19 to 20 watts. The 9 foot heat tape available in the local hardware stores uses 63 watts. I hope this note helps some people.

This is my second attempt at trying to keep a water pipe connected to an outdoor faucet from freezing. The first was an earlier EasyHeat heating cable version that required assembly and had no built-in thermostat. It basically was a failure since assembly was difficult and once I got it to heat it went to over 80 degrees all the time.This M-D heating cable actually works correctly and requires no assembly. The thermostat comes on perfectly at 38 degrees as registered by my own attached thermometer.The only thing that I would have preferred, which the EasyHeat allowed, was being able to overlap the cable. In my situation, the end of the cable including the thermostat had to be placed near the center of the pipe section requiring heat. So not overlapping was difficult.Overall, a very good product so far.