Home and ice

Pity the wretched new homeowner who had lived in rentals all his life and now suddenly has to cope with a myriad of new and unfamiliar problems of plumbing, roofing, and wiring so now has to learn it all through the School of Hard Knocks. Or worse yet, sympathize with the widow on a fixed income who has never had to deal with this sort of thing but who is left with a huge home; a leaky pipe squirting all over the bathroom wall, tiles blowing off the roof, or a sudden short-circuit leaving her without electricity. Yet only a tiny part of her woes is the occasional hard freeze:

For the first winter in a decade, thanks to the foresight of the Building and Plumbing Industry I am iced up outside and in. For instance I have been unable to water for several consecutive days. With thousands of feet of pvc primary distribution buried 18 in. below the surface, it allegedly freezes only at the very top of the riser. Of course I could have disconnected and drained the timers then set the bibs–dozens of them–to drip all night but that would have entailed just a whole lot of work. So I let them freeze up, according to past experience suggesting they would survive undamaged, while ice occurs only at the very top.

In the High Desert (around Victorville, CA) that’s reportedly the upper three to four inches, which shouldn’t get cold enough to split it; though I’m not entirely confident whether this figure applies in a freeze of such magnitude and so I am exercising my tenuous relation with God, hoping She won’t let you down in this matter. Also you might consider that freezing of the topsoil would prevent evaporation of the ground water and that therefore your plantings should be safe provided this record chill persists only for another few days.

It’s all up to our Maker.

Likewise our swimming-pool pump has iced up for only the second time in a decade so if you also have one and leave it in service during the winter as I do, be sure to shut it down til the freeze abates. If you fail to do so, and if you are lucky, the breaker will simply pop. But depending on the distribution of the load and your relationship with the Deity, you might instead burn out the pump. You will thank me.

Still outside is your fishpond. If it is constructed of solid material such as plastic or concrete, be sure to go out there every morning and remove the ice sheet forming on top. If you don’t, after a couple of days it will thicken to several inches, whereupon the lateral force of expansion will crack the walls and empty it, leaving your koi and goldfish gasping at the bottom and you to learn about the use of hydraulic cement or silicone caulk.

Just how you remove this coating is up to you, but don’t do so by smashing it up, as each blow sends to the fish an underwater blast much like the Navy sonar pulse that beaches whales. So the experts recommend hot water, though they don’t explain how you get it there from the house if your garden hose is iced up.

But many if not most of your problems will occur inside. Our home is divided into two connected sections I call the North House and the South House. The former is centrally heated and unlike many other homes where the lines are situated in a crawl space or the attic, ours run below the concrete foundation and therefore are presumably safe. So here, instead of letting a half-dozen taps run all night, you can simply leave the heat on, albeit turned down low.

The South House is another problem altogether. It uses only a couple of space (wall) heaters and so you might conclude that prudence dictates you apply the drip method, entailing all kinds of new questions. In the kitchen you note a single tap which supposedly you should set in midposition in order to protect both the cold and hot tubing.

But if you use a demand heater, don’t drip too fast lest it also run all night, upping your gas bill to gigantic proportions. It’s especially vulnerable if owing to the noise it was situated outside. Notwithstanding their insulation, you can safely guess that in a chill of this consequence without a slight flow, its connections will freeze and burst.

Then there’s the bathroom, where I assume we would have to let drip not only both sink faucets but the shower too, for reasons mentioned above. Yet presenting still another set of problems is our guest quarters in the loft of the barn, with both kitchen sink and bathroom but only a single space heater, the lines coming up through an outside wall. I would suppose these pipes sandwiched between two layers of insulation. The home-construction sector not being replete with rocket scientists, however, we can’t depend upon this assumption and therefore it would seem requisite to let all these faucets drip as well.

Thus before the snap diminishes I hope complaints.com might share my observations with you, and it is hoped that members might look into the various implications of my contribution and correct, amend, or append any judged to require further amplification.

Dale Hileman

11085 Chipmunk Rd

Apple Valley, CA 92308

1-760-240-1700