5 Winter Mistakes That Burst Your Pipes (Fix Them Before the First Freeze)

It is the first hard freeze of the year, nine degrees and windy, and you are asleep. Somewhere in an outside wall or the garage ceiling, one section of pipe got too cold, the water stopped moving, and it froze. Here is what almost nobody knows: water grows about nine percent when it freezes, and a pipe does not usually split where the ice is. The ice is a cork, and the water trapped between that cork and your closed faucet has nowhere to go. The pressure climbs until the pipe opens like a seam. And then nothing happens, not yet, because it is still frozen. It comes out two days later, in the thaw, while you are at work. The men who dry out houses say the average burst-pipe loss runs five to ten thousand dollars. Almost every one was preventable in September with about twenty dollars and one afternoon. Five mistakes, mi amigo. Most are free to fix. One takes sixty seconds. And the last one decides whether you get a wet floor or a destroyed house, and it is not the pipe. In this video: • MISTAKE 1, THE HOSE STILL ON THE SPIGOT: the water in the hose freezes first, the ice pushes back into the pipe inside your wall, and it splits where you cannot see it. And the catch that gets careful people: a FROST-FREE faucet only works with the hose OFF. Leave a hose on it and the barrel cannot drain, and you just turned a frost-free faucet into a regular one. Fix: take every hose off today, drain the line, foam cover for a few dollars (a wool sock and a bag if they are sold out). • MISTAKE 2, THE THERMOSTAT TOO LOW WHEN YOU ARE AWAY: never below 55 in winter, never off. That number is the floor that keeps the inside of your walls above freezing, and it is reconciled with the thermostat video: setbacks are fine, going past 55 is not. Ask a neighbor to walk through, or set a low-temperature alert, because the real killer is the furnace quitting on day two of a five-day trip. • MISTAKE 3, THE COLD SPOTS YOU MADE: cabinet doors closed under sinks on outside walls (open them on freeze nights) · the garage door standing open for the "five-minute" shoveling job · crawlspace vents left open in January. • MISTAKE 4, THE NAKED PIPE IN THE COLD ROOM: garage, crawlspace, attic, well house. Foam sleeves, two or three dollars for six feet, elbows and joints too. HONEST: insulation does not make heat, it only slows it down. A truly exposed pipe needs thermostat-controlled, safety-listed HEAT TAPE, thirty or forty dollars, wrapped exactly as the box says, never crossed over itself, never on a hose. And kill the DRAFT: a pipe at thirty degrees is fine, a pipe at thirty degrees with wind on it is the one that goes. • THE TWO BAD-NIGHT TOOLS: drip the faucet farthest from the meter, hot and cold, a pencil trickle (running water does not freeze, and the pressure has somewhere to go). And switch the furnace fan from AUTO to ON for those two or three nights only, to kill the cold spots, then put it back. In the thermostat video I called fan-ON a bad habit. It still is. This is a tool you pick up for a night, not a way of life. • MISTAKE 5, YOU DO NOT KNOW WHERE THE MAIN SHUTOFF IS: the pipe does not destroy the house, TIME does. Two minutes is a mop. An hour is drywall and flooring. A workday is a restoration truck. Find it this week, TURN IT once while nothing is wrong (a valve untouched for fifteen years may not turn, or may weep), tag it, show the family. And twenty dollars of battery water alarms where the pipes live. THE ARITHMETIC: foam covers, sleeves, heat tape and alarms, fifty to a hundred dollars and one October Saturday. Or the holiday-rate emergency plumber, the restoration company, the flooring, the cabinets, the claim, and the rate that follows the house. There is a whole industry in the thaw. There is nothing in September. Tell me in the comments: have you ever had a pipe burst, where was it, and what did it cost? The state and the number. Minnesota and Texas are fighting different wars, and Texas is the one that gets surprised. I read every one. My wife's channels: Clean The Mexican Way · Cook The Mexican Way