February 6, 2007
damn frozen pipes
We congratulated ourselves for not getting our pipes frozen last night, having dripped faucets all over the house. As the pipes, have never frozen during the daytime, we turned the drips off when we left for work this morning. Bad idea…
Like before, the space heater is now chugging away up under the house…
Nooooooooo… now you have me worried about what I’ll find when I get home - we left ours dripping last night but turned them off today. This is my first year in a house with pipes running in a crawl space, and they’re insulated but we don’t have any heat ducts or anything to add warmth down there.
What kind of space heater do you use down there? I’m a little nervous about running something down there that might be a fire hazard.
yeah, we were really nervous about having the space heater running out of sight, too, but we didn’t know what else to do. Ours is electric, on an extension cord. It has a safety feature whereas it’ll cut off if it tilts over even just the slightest bit.
Once when it was under there, one of the outside cats peed on it. Nice, eh?
Our water came back about 45 minutes after I put the heater under there. The sound of the pipes sputtering and then blasting water was a nice relief.
Sorry to hear about your pipes! I also have to worry about that. I have a water pipe running under a crawl space that is outside of the original footprint of the house. It has some heating tape wrapped around it — every winter when it gets this cold for days, I plug it in and it seems to do the trick.
You can buy foam pipe insulators, as well as heat tape. Our oil line once froze between the tank, and where it entered our foundations. The old foam insulation had died (it was years old at that point). So, we ran do the hardware store, bought heat tape, wrapped it around the pipe, put the new insulation over the pipe and heat tape both, used electrical tape to hold the insulation closed, plugged in heat tape to an extension cord inside the basement, and voila’ 20 minutes later, our furnace was running again. The heat tape has an onboard thermostat, so it only turns on when it’s cold enough. It’s probably safer than a space heater.
I agree with the above posters. Insulating can work wonders, and make sure your crawl space is closed off, with no breezes.
All vent covers and entryways should be closed. If you still have problems, Cathy’s heat tape sounds like a good next resort.