Pipes start icing at 20ºF and below. Down to how many ºF do the foam sleeves protect the pipe? The foams I placed in my outdoor pipes had a 0.35" thick polyurethane foam surrounding them.
This is a picture of the sleeves I installed:
Water – At what temperatures do pipe sleeves protect pipes from freezing
insulationpipewater
Related Solutions
Some different ideas:
Remove the baseboard water heater and replace with electric, thereby creating it's own zone. If the only pipes in this room were for the radiator, you wouldn't even need to set the heat, as there are no more pipes to worry about.
Add insulation to the mudroom
Keep mudroom door open when using wood heater
Splice your pipes and add the mudroom baseboard to one of the other circuits that will be running even when wood stove is on (basement, likely).
To raise the float level without adding any additional points of failure, just move the whole pump up - shorten the pipe, put concrete blocks under the pump to raise it in the pit. Your power bill will thank you.
You could try putting a strong dye [food coloring or fabric dye can work, but "septic dye" is probably the most effective] in the water, though it may be hard to tell what's happening with that - I have to suspect that you may be pumping in circles (outlet insufficiently far from the house, so the "discharged' water shows up in the pit a few minutes later) but that will be tricky to trace with dye. If all the water is "new" the dye should just get progressively paler, and the water coming in the drainage pipes should be clear, not tinted. You can also look for dye coming out into places away from the house.
A more complicated approach that might work would be to mix up or buy a strong dye solution and use a tube to "inject" it very near the pump intake as the pump is pumping (trying to minimize what gets in the sump itself) and then you might see the sump get darker if it's recirculating.
It sounds like the water may be passing in from one or more of your pipes and out again from one or more of your pipes (when the pump is not powered up) - a little bit of dye squirted near each pipe in turn (with the pump off) may diagnose this and show if there is "flow-though."
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Best Answer
There is a time aspect not just r-value. No matter what r-value something has it doesn't keep something warmer for an infinite amount of time. If there is no temperature coming from inside the pipe (pipes just laying there), then the pipes will very soon be the same temperature as outside.
What you are relying on is the temperature inside the housing to provide this section of pipe with warmer air. Which depends on the temperature inside and the amount of water flow through this section. Really no way to answer the question accurately because there are a ton of variables. You are going to get way more warm (inside) air dispersed on the pipe by keeping the water running than by putting a sleeve on it for example.