Exceedingly Mundane

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Jan
08
Posted by Stace

Frozen Pipes!

I wasn’t going to blog again this soon, but this one had to get documented!

I thought when you had a new house, you didn’t have to worry about things like pipes freezing! Wrong. At our old house, we never had the pipes freeze, not in the 21 years that I lived there. We never had to leave faucets dripping or had a burst pipe. But, we had a different kind of water heater and different piping (apparently… I’m learning a lot today!) at the old house. This new house has a tankless water heater in the attic and instead of copper pipes, it has some kind of flexible pvc pipe, but they are exposed, so they freeze. I just got back from an emergency run to Home Depot to buy pipe insulation, and hopefully Tim can wrap more pipes in the attic tonight. Then maybe this won’t be an ongoing problem. It was really weird, when I woke up, some things worked and some things didn’t. Two showers wouldn’t come on, and one would. The hot would not come on in most sinks, but the cold in a couple. Tim had left several faucets dripping last night, and that seemed to help some. Also, I think he had wrapped a few pipes a couple of months ago, I know we bought some insulating things a while back, probably before Thanksgiving. Anyway, it took till 1:45 PM this afternoon for the last one to thaw. I hope they don’t freeze again tonight, or again for that matter 🙂

To be fair, we’re having extremely cold weather. Last night, it dropped to 13 degrees here, which is inordinately colder than normal. Today, the high is supposed to only be 33 or 34 degrees this afternoon, and so far, at 4:00 PM, it did get to 34. I was out this morning going to the doctor and it’s funny how much warmer 34 degrees feels compared to the 16 it was when I left the house!

I’m glad to have THAT doctor visit over for another year. I just have to hear back from the tests and I should be in the clear. Most of my bloodwork and numbers were really good – blood sugar, HDL/LDL, cholesterol were all good. My blood pressure was slightly elevated, 141/80, but I’m chalking that up to the pipes freezing and me being rattled all morning trying to get things done here with hardly any water. LOL! 😀

Later, gaters!

8:00 PM UPDATE: Well, Tim got up in the attic after work and it was very slow going trying to wrap the pipes with the insulating sheaths I bought at Home Depot (it seems to be the way the plumber guy did the lines in the attic, he is very upset about how it was done). He was very frustrated, both with work and the water/pipes issue, so he declared he wanted to go and get rolls of insulation and try that. So, we went to the new Schlotsky’s and I got treated out to dinner (I had a california avocado flatbread and he had chicken and dumpling soup and half a sandwich, it was good!). Then we got more insulation, and now he’s back up in the attic trying the rolls. Fingers crossed! Already below freezing again, 26 degrees, so things could start freezing again 🙁