Dodged a Bullet
We woke up this morning to no water in our house.
Silly as it may seem, we checked the faucets upstairs and down, hoping that one of them might yield a trickle that could, oh, I don’t know – unblock everything else? Yeah…no luck.
I could’ve kicked myself. I’d actually had a conversation with someone just yesterday about the danger, in this weather, of pipes freezing. My friend and I discussed keeping a trickle of water coming out of a faucet, to avoid this very peril, particularly in an old house like we both own. And then, as soon as we had the conversation I forgot it. BOOM. Out of my head entirely.
Whose Fault Was It, Anyway?
So when Karl admitted, chagrined, that he’d not even thought about keeping a little water running through the pipes last night, I had to fess up. It was bad enough that he’d not thought about it at all; but it was far worse that I had thought about it, and then promptly forgot it.
No use in blaming each other. In my experience, blame never improves a situation; it only makes things worse. We’ll be celebrating our 34th year of owning this house on March 15th. In all that time, the pipes have never frozen. There were a couple of years, though, where we had similar frigid snaps. I seem to recall a ‘polar vortex’ hitting us about five or six years ago, if I’m not mistaken. It ended up killing our English walnut in the back yard, the ground froze so deep. Even then, we never had a pipe freeze. Possibly because we kept a little water running through the pipes…
Karl went into the cellar (and yes, we have a cellar, not a basement – dirt floor and everything) to check the pipe that comes into the house from the well. When he came upstairs, he admitted that when he squeezed the pipe, he could feel and hear a ‘crunching’ noise, so he assumed it was ice. Ugh. Lucky for us, though, nothing had broken – yet.
Strategies
We discussed methods of unfreezing the pipe, opting for application of a heating pad. As he was fishing around in our downstairs bathroom cupboard, looking for a heating pad, I was standing in the kitchen, calculating whether there was enough water in my espresso machine’s reservoir to make myself a coffee, when all of a sudden I heard a <<thunk>> and a swoosh.
I called out to Karl, asking if he’d heard it, too. (He hadn’t.) I was really worried that a pipe had just burst and the ‘swoosh’ I’d heard was water cascading onto the dirt floor in the cellar at the front of the house.
Instead, I went to the kitchen sink and tried the faucet once more. Ta da! Water sprang forth, running free and clear. Karl had apparently dislodged enough of the freshly formed ice within the pipe to get it to break free! Huzzah!
Yup. We dodged a bullet. Thank goodness we didn’t have to face either the ordeal of the potential expense of repairing busted pipes, or at the very least, the hassle of no flushing toilets or running water the entire weekend. Lesson learned, we’re keeping the water on at a trickle, and we’re taking the added precaution of wrapping the incoming pipe with a cloth, keeping the heating pad snugly cuddling it securely in place.
I hope all of you are staying warm in the midst of this polar vortex. As a PSA, may I remind you to keep a trickle of water coming out of your faucet until things warm up on Monday.
And may your day be filled with serendipitous breakthroughs such as those we experienced this morning.
Glacial water cascading from high in the Sayan Mountains of Siberia (Photo by L. Weikel)
(T-1029)
I know this story all too well, Lisa. My Grandmother had a crawl space below her house and many was the time Dad had to squeeze himself in beneath to adjust or add to the pitiful insulation surrounding the water pipes. Mom called her often during the winter to remind her to leave the water running. Even just recently in our sojourn on the ranch in California, we discovered that when a previous idiot caretaker had added plumbing to the workshop, his design required that the pipes run outside of the building. So we built a cover, hoped for the best, and still decided to let the water run. Stay warm, my friend.
I’ll bet this does ring true for you, Paula! You grew up in the (freezing) midwest, didn’t you? The temperatures they’ve had to endure this week were unbelievable.
I think there’s a reluctance in me to let the water dribble out because of my desire to *not waste water*. That said, our scare yesterday morning quickly disabused me of that worry. At least in single digit weather!