I've only heard about external water pipes when somebody wants to rant about how bad some british houses are. Pipes on the outside, separate taps for hot and cold, carpeted bathrooms, poor insulation with drafts. I've never seen it done in reality even in houses several hundred years old, and in Michigan they would freeze as soon as winter arrives.

You can put insulation and siding over the pipes outside what is currently the house (and remove insulation inside if necessary). That way the pipes will stay at the same temperature as the inside of the house. Or, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878006, heat tape. As an extra bonus, if they do freeze, they'll leak outside the house instead of flooding inside the house.

> The plumbing is added to the outside of the house

Does it not freeze in Europe? If they did that in Flint the pipes would freeze in the winter.

Glad you pointed it out, there was something that didn't quite add up there. Yes it freezes in europe, those pipes would get destroyed if they were on the outside.

It's probably easier to replace pipes in an older European house anyway; less insulation / less layered walls, less things embedded in concrete, sometimes even wood beam floors. I lived in a >100 year old house that was renovated at some point, newer pipes and electricity was put up against the walls, then a layer of drywall was applied everywhere to make things look tidy.

I am not aware of pipes outside the house here in Germany. Maybe he is referring to southern Europe?

I live in southern Europe and there are no pipes outside the house either.

Not in the east either, they would get frozen very quick.

There are lots of ways to stop pipes from freezing. A couple are mentioned here.

Another way is to put the valve below the freeze line in the ground. Opening the valve to the water would close a drain valve in the pipe leading from it to the faucet, and closing the valve would open the drain valve.

I have a setup like this at my house, although the two valves are not linked. It works fine.

That can probably be solved with some insulation and a variety of optional ways to add heat sources.

It really wouldn’t. Unless by insulation and heat sources you mean… by putting the pipes inside the house.

Otherwise you’re just building a house around your outside pipes.

No amount of insulation is going to help your pipes outside overnight under a certain temperature. The water isn’t moving because you aren’t using any of it.

We had some pipes inside under the floor of an old addition of an older farmhouse which regularly froze despite being inside, our wellhouse had hundreds of watts of heating. There’s no chance of pipes exposed outside in a northern US climate not freezing.

Insulating and heating outside pipes is a solved problem and adding a small layer of insulation around a pipe with electrical heating elements is much cheaper and energy efficient than insulating+heating an entire house. Short term anyhow.

Keyword is "self-regulating pipe heating cable".

I don't know why you're making it out like it's rocket science and with such confidence.

I've never seen this anywhere but in the UK. I guess it works there because of relatively the mild winters? Michigan on the other side, has a continental climate.

Drain pipes on the outside are fairly common. I'm not sure about water lines though.

Pretty standard in trailer parks. You'll need some heat tape in the winter to keep it from freezing, but I'd say that's a good trade off for less lead.

Most new plumbing is done with plastic pipes (blue for cold, red for hot) that can be snaked and fished less destructively than metal pipes. While these don't contain lead, they may contaminate the water in unknown ways.

The type of plastic used for water pipes (cross-linked polyethylene, or PEX) has no known safety concerns as far as I am aware, mostly because it doesn't require added plasticisers. This is in contrast to PVC, which often contains phthalates and polycarbonate, which often contains bisphenols.