With cold weather coming in fast, it’s time to start thinking about how to best protect your water pipes. Frozen pipes can absolutely wreak havoc on your home. They can cause your pipes to burst, and can quickly become an expensive accident.
How to Prevent Frozen Pipes in Your Home
The best way to ensure that your pipes stay intact is to prevent any freezing in the first place. Once you notice that the weather is starting to get below freezing, that is the best time to act. To prevent your pipes from freezing you can do a couple of things.
- Turn on a water faucet to a slow drip. Even water flowing as slowly as a trickle can prevent frozen pipes.
- Insulate your pipes. By wrapping exposed outside pipes and insulating unexposed pipes can keep the cold air from reaching your pipes causing them to freeze.
- Keep your house warm. Obviously, warm air inside your house can prevent your pipes from freezing.
How to Thaw Frozen Pipes
Unfortunately, even with preparation, your pipes can still freeze. In that case, the best thing you can do is attempt to thaw them. There are several ways to do this, and although you can wait out the cold to allow them to thaw naturally, this is generally unadvised because the longer that your pipes remain frozen, the more likely it is that you will experience pipe damage.
One of the most common ways to thaw your frozen pipes is to turn on the faucet and keep it running. Much like in the preventative principles behind the practice, moving water is harder to freeze than still water. Another method that you can try is to take a blow dryer to the affected area. The heat from the blow dryer is just hot enough to melt the ice without causing any damage to the pipes. This is why it is generally not recommended to use heat guns or any other high-temperature tools used for melting objects, as it could damage the integrity of your pipes.
Frozen Pipe Damage
Water expands when it freezes, which can be a disaster when the water is in an enclosed, unexpandable environment. Similar to when you put a full glass bottle of water in the freezer, the liquid expands when frozen and often causes the glass to break. The same thing happens with your pipes.
When a pipe breaks in your home, it can lead to flooding that can end up damaging walls, floors, furniture, and anything else that the water touches. Because your water pipes are under pressure, usually around 40-80 PSI, even the smallest crack in a pipe can lead to an extraordinary amount of water loss. Just a ⅛ crack in a pipe can spew up to 250 gallons of water in a single day.
Repair Frozen Pipes with Denson Plumbing
If you have sustained any damage from frozen pipes, Denson Plumbing is here to help. No problem is too large for our experts who commit to providing the best plumbing services possible. Contact us for all of your plumbing needs!