I live on Cape Cod and I drain dozens of homes and about four hotels for the winter. They save huge money in fuel and don't have to worry about power outages or boiler failure or anything, all winter long. Just the peace of mind knowing nothing bad will happen is well worth the fees I charge to blow out a home.

The way I handle it is:
Fist I make up an adapter to go from my compressor hose to a sill-cock or a low-point drain if the sill-cocks are frost-free w/ vac breakers.
Next I close all water closet stops, and hook a hose on the water heater drain and start draining water heater as I fill the tank with air.
After the water heater is empty I remove my hose and charge the tank to full pressure.
I then go to every fixture and run out the water until the water is gone and just air comes out.
after which I go and pump out the water from the toilets with a hand bilge pump, and open the angle stop to blow out the fill valve.
Next I stuff a ball of TP in the bowl opening to keep the sewer flies out, and add a little anti-freeze to protect the water ways
in the toilet through the overflow.
Then I run the washer and the dish washer to drain the solenoid valves, and pump some anti-freeze through the pump to the drain.
When done with all the water removal I go back and add a little anti-freeze to all the fixture traps.
Depending on what type of heat they have I will either blow out the heating zones or add antifreeze to the system.
A lot of the homes have air heat so I need to do nothing except drain the humidifier. When done I leave the system charged with air and in the Spring when the air is still in the system I know I can turn the water on with no worry. This post is pretty long so I may have missed something but you should get the picture.... you know all us plumbers have good common sense that carries us through most of these new tasks.
Some people and plumber think it is silly to drain a house for the winter but have a couple of floods under your belt and you will know it is well worth any price you need to charge for it.
Also the insurance companies agree with me that if you leave your home in freezing conditions and don't provide some type of fool proof protection for the home you are due to have a catastrophe and run the risk of being dropped.
I Hate fixing split pipes and will do whatever it take to avoid having to do it!

In addition sometime you will get a water heater like a boiler Mate with the feed in the same place as the drain and will make it hard to blow out. The way I handle this is but putting a dime in a faucet aerator and forcing the cold down the hot and back feeding the tank with the cold supply closed.



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