This year, today marks the day id finally got cold enough to endanger our home’s water supply. I found it out at 3:30 in the morning. Khallarnie woke up and cried for a bottle, which is rare as of late, but I needed the toilette, so I volunteered to go get her a bottle. I flushed and did not hear the water running to fill the tank, and when I went to wash my hands only got enough cold water to do just that, just barely.
When I went to the kitchen after to get the bottle, I double checked there just to be sure, and there was no water at all. So that confirmed in my mind that there was a freeze on the water line. I went back up with the bottle and fed the baby. After she fell back to sleep, I got up, much to the surprise of my missus. “Can’t it wait till morning?” she asked.
“In the morning we will have people wanting showers, or coffee, or lean dishes or flushed toilettes and so on, so I’d rather just sort it out now, and hopefully before we end up with a busted water line.” That was not entirely true because I knew that when my cousin had put in the new water line from the main to the house, he used a flex line that allowed for expansion, and would not bust when it freezes. I also knew that he ran it through a basement window rather than use a masonry bit on the wall, so why ever he did that, it would likely be there that it is frozen.
I gathered my wife’s industrial heat gun that she bought for embossing, and dressed very warm and with two pairs of socks because I knew there was going to be water in the basement. The first stop was out front with the kettle in hand, and a visit to the frost free hydrant by the garage. That worked just fine, and I filled the kettle up for a coffee. That confirmed my suspicions that it was us, not the city, who had the water problem, and isolated that problem to roughly the basement window, as suspected.
After a hot drink, I climbed into the basement and retrieved the electrical cord from the sump pump, which was running but not pumping water out because the outlet pipe is frozen solid. Okay, I won’t be plugging that back in, and that is also likely how my grandparents have burned out numerous pumps in the past on this house. I brought the cord over to the location where the water main came through the basement window and plugged in the super hot heat gun. A couple of flexes of the main and I could hear the ice inside breaking apart. I applied heat, and warmed about three feet of pipe to the Styrofoam in the window. The window well is crammed full of Styrofoam to insulate, but I cut about an inch of it away from the pipe in order to get heat to it going outside. I only had to warm into that hole for a minute and I heard a loud banging in the pipe as the water began to rush through. Just like that, and for today, the problem is almost solved.
The last trick was to turn on a tap in the bathroom to a little less tan a quarter of an inch wide flow. That flow should generally prevent any more freezing till I can come up with a more permanent solution, such as rerouting the water line through a basement wall below the window by at least two and a half or three feet. Relatively speaking, that would likely be one of the easiest things to do to fix the problem, and the best. I genuinely have no idea why it was not done in the first place.
This is the first year that anyone has spent the winter in the house since my grandparent bought it 12 years ago, and they claim nobody did when the last owners had it before them. So we have maybe twenty years or so of the house sitting vacant in the winters, and no history telling us what to expect. As problems present themselves, we have got to come up with solutions that will work for many years to come in the bitter cold here. I am told that I can expect winter days to stay as cold as –20 F That being the case, I have to get sump water out of the basement without the benefit of a location below the pump line to drop the water into, which would allow me to keep the drain pipe below ground, or even on a down hill slant in order to keep it empty and frost free. I also have this freezing water main problem, a busted drain I cannot access from the kitchen into the basement which is likely broken because of freezing also, and a diesel truck that will not start below 10 F unless we can get a block heater installed. We also have windows that need further insulating to prevent heat loss. We are currently spending more than $400 per month for heating on the house! Draught-proofing also needs to be put around the back door, and a cold pantry sorted out as the room was only at 34 F when I went into it this morning to get to the basement door.
It is all part of the fun and is perfectly acceptable! I am more than happy to sort all of these problems out!
Kelsey J Bacon