Running antifreeze through the faucets is not winterizing. It is the beginning of it.
The failure mode that costs the most is water left somewhere nobody thought to check, not water left in an obvious line. A line that splits inside a wall over winter is not discovered until spring, and by then it has usually done more damage than the freeze itself.
Running the faucets until they run dry clears the visible lines but leaves water sitting in the water heater, in low-point drains, and in traps under sinks and showers — all places that hold water and all places a freeze reaches just as easily as a supply line.
A water heater holds a meaningful volume of water that the faucet lines never touch, and without a bypass valve routed correctly, antifreeze never reaches the rest of the system while the tank itself stays full and exposed to the freeze.
These are built into the system specifically to let water out at its lowest points, and they are exactly the fittings people forget because they are out of sight. Skipping them is the single most common reason a winterization looks complete and is not.
A split line inside a wall or under a cabinet is not found until the system is pressurized again in spring, which means the damage has usually had months to spread before anyone notices. It is a far more expensive repair than the winterization would have been, and it is the entire reason the job exists.
Utah does not stay uniformly cold all winter — it swings, and a rig in outdoor storage goes through repeated freeze-thaw cycles rather than one steady freeze. Anything left even partially wet gets more chances to do damage, not fewer.
Flushing the antifreeze out of the system, sanitizing the fresh water tank, and checking for anything that cracked or split over winter belongs before the first trip, not on the way to it. Finding a problem in the driveway is a very different experience than finding it at a campsite.
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