Frozen water pipes

I was meeting with a client today when I got a call from my wife that the sinks upstairs in our house had no running water.  With the weather being 16-25 degrees lately, my immediate guess was we had a frozen water pipe somewhere.  (My second guess was that the city shut off our water for some inexplicable reason…but my first guess proved right.)  After my appointment I headed home to see what the situation was.  My son was very interested in why the water didn’t come out of the sinks anymore.

Our kitchen sink ran cold water just fine, but no hot water.  No other sink or toilet in the house had running water.  So, I changed into some grubby clothes, grabbed a flashlight and my Petzl headlamp and made my way into our crawlspace.  By the way, our crawlspace is just that, a space with JUST enough room to crawl.  No kneeling goes on when you have about 18-24 inches of clearance.  Not a fun place to be if you don’t like tight spaces, spiders or the occasional mouse or river rat.  Luckily I am not claustrophobic, otherwise the squeezing under the floor joists would not go well.

Anyway, I found the main line entering the house and the “T” where one water pipe goes straight up to our kitchen sink and the other goes toward the water heater.  The sink cold water worked, but the rest of the house didn’t so I figured (correctly it turns out) that “T” must be frozen.  It didn’t feel frozen to me, but it was cold.  I turned on an old hair dryer and held it to several spots on the line coming off the “T” and focused on the “T” itself for about 10 minutes.  My wife started pounding on the floor and I knew it worked, as the water came on in the upstairs bathroom sinks. 

After coming back out of the crawlspace, no easy task in itself, I realized that the HOT water in the kitchen still didn’t work.  It has an elbow RIGHT next to the ”T” I worked on.  That second pipe is the hot water coming from the water heater, and it was frozen still.  Everything in the whole house worked except the hot water for the kitchen.  So, I got back under the house, this time taking a partial roll of insulation that I had kept in the garage (for years) for who knows what, and ran the hairdryer on the return pipe for a few minutes.  Then, when the water started flowing, I lined those pipes with insulation so this won’t happen again.  Keeping that insulation in the garage for 4 years turned out to be a good thing, so you see, sometimes all the stuff (junk, my wife would say) we keep around does come in handy. 

I also went out and closed all 5 of the foundation vents.  I normally close them every year, but for some reason had not done it yet this year.  Lesson learned.

I got to thinking about how much a plumber would have charged to fix the problem, and how long I would have had to wait without water.  I am just happy to be able to fit in the crawlspace, and not get too upset by the confined environment down there.  Our house was built in 1920, and those new homes that I sell with the crawlspaces you can walk around in sure sound appealing at times like these.

One funny thing that happend was my son, who is 3, was at the entrance to the crawlspace for much of the time I was in there, and he wanted to come be with me.  I told him he wouldn’t like it and it wasn’t going to happen, but later I got to thinking that I need to teach HIM how to take care of stuff under the house and let HIM do it the next time something comes up!    Maybe in a few years he can take over.