The primer is good. I have glued a bunch of joints without it, and had one fail from time to time. Can't help you with the freezing part, sorry. All of the screw in pvc fittings seem to be hard to open/close sometimes, good reason to keep a multi-tool around. As for the leaking, that shouldn't be happening. Did you have it screwed in all the way? Putting some pvc tape on the threads might help with the waterproofness, and might even help with the ease of opening/closing. One thing to keep in mind: no matter what they claim, pvc is not really UV protected, at least not the usual schedule 40 stuff. It gets brittle with time. So if you start to build up a stash, I would recommend storing it out of the sun...