The night it hits 15 degrees, this is the ten minutes that matters
We get more calls in a single cold snap than in the whole of October, and almost all of them come from the same three places in the house.
Outside hose bibs. Crawl spaces. And, on the raised houses south of Merrick Road, the supply lines running through what used to be a warm basement and is now open air under the floor.
That last one catches people out. The house was lifted after Sandy, the plumbing came along with it, and a pipe that spent fifty years at sixty degrees now spends January at whatever it is outside. Same pipe, same house, completely different risk.
Before the cold: disconnect the garden hose. Not next week — a hose left on traps water in the bib and the bib splits inside the wall, where you will not see it until spring. Then insulate anything you can reach in a crawl space, and if you have a cabinet against an outside wall with plumbing in it, leave the doors open on the coldest nights.
Let a faucet drip if it is going below twenty. Moving water is much harder to freeze, and a dripping tap costs pennies against a burst line.
If a pipe has already frozen and you have no water at one fixture: open that faucet so there is somewhere for the pressure to go as it thaws, and warm the pipe gently with a hair dryer working back from the tap.
Do not use a torch. We say it every year and every year somebody does it. Open flame on a frozen pipe boils the trapped water into steam inside a closed section, and steam has nowhere to go. That is how a frozen pipe becomes a burst pipe, and how a burst pipe becomes a house fire.
And know where your main shutoff is before you need it. In a basement it is usually on the wall facing the street. On a slab it is often in a box in the crawl space or outside near the meter. Find it on a Sunday afternoon in good light, not at two in the morning with water coming through a ceiling.
Got a question about your own place? Call (516) 756-9201 — we’re happy to talk it through.