Comments on: How to Prevent Frozen Water Pipes

By: Home Maintenance to Save Money This Fall and Winter | Diary Of A House Bear

Home Maintenance to Save Money This Fall and Winter | Diary Of A House Bear — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:17:54 +0000

[...] cost to protect yourself from this winter. Each year thousands of dollars of damage are caused by frozen water pipes. Make sure your home isn’t part of the statistic. Use foam pipe insulation to protect your [...]

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:14:00 +0000

Freezing pipes are never fun…
My family owns a cabin in the mountains and we are always so scared of really cold winters because of freezing pipes. It’s not practical for us to run the heater all the time, and we try out best to insulate the pipes, but sometimes it just gets way too cold… Recently, we found about this thing called FireEar. It’s a home monitor that protects your home from freezing pipes, possible fires, and power outages. It sends you a text message or calls you if something goes wrong. They also have an insurance discount that you can do that will actually save you money on your insurance bill. Check it out! FireEar

By: Mar

Mar — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:51:46 +0000

We thought our pipes froze once in our old house and worked most of the day (a Sunday) to get them unfrozen. I swear the basement was 75 degrees and we still couldn’t get the water to work. We finally broke down and called a plumber, who kindly charged regular, not Sunday, rates. Why? Because he felt sorry for us because the pipe was actually frozen at the water meter, not in our house! Who knew? He took off the man hole cover (so we would have needed him anyway), blew the hair dryer down on the meter for about 10 minutes, and we had running water! We kept it running slowly all night and didn’t have a problem, even though we wasted some water.

By: Constance

Constance — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:07:52 +0000

Great post! As a Canadian, I just wanted to warn you that letting the tap drip increases the chance of the pipe freezing-there’s just not enough water going through so the water can freeze! Let it run slowly, instead.

By: Nancy

Nancy — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:52:58 +0000

The pipes in part of our house froze, right above the laundry room. This part of the house is not as well insulated as the rest, and harder to get to via the attic access due to an add on. I had some laundry in the dryer, ran it, and the pipes began to unfreeze. When I saw what was going on, ran the dryer on high and the heat rose and thawed the pipes in that part of the house!

By: carol at A Second Cup

carol at A Second Cup — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:07:00 +0000

Good tips. I like the heater idea.

By: Angelsong

Angelsong — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:49:28 +0000

If you cannot afford to buy anything to cover your pipes with, a couple of pairs of old, thick socks work great. Put the socks over the exposed pipes, and cover them with a plastic bag, secured with a cable tie. This will prevent the socks from getting wet when it rains, and the cable tie can be cut to remove the bag and socks when it warms up.

Old newspapers or an old tee shirt can also be used in a similar manner.

By: Ria

Ria — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:01:17 +0000

One of the upsides to living in a place where we frequently expect it to get really cold for almost half the year is that houses are built with this eventuality in mind. 20 years of living in Canada and I’ve never once had to deal with frozen pipes, even though the temperature dips down to around -30 Celcius in the winter.