Frozen Pipes are No Fun!

E and I were married in January and I'll never forget one of our fist big adventures as a couple. The home we were moving into was a rental that had been vacant for a while. I figured, since I had no idea who had been there last that I would give the place a good cleaning before we started moving in. When I went over to accomplish this task I realized that we had not water. After talking to the managers and verifying that they had, in fact, turned on the water, we set out to find what the problem was.

Of course, being January, the problem was a frozen pipe under the house. Once we discovered the problem we had to figure out how to fix it. By this time it was after hours on a Friday and we weren't very interested in waiting until Monday to get the problem fixed so E headed outside in his boots. What we discovered is that there was supposed to be heating tape and a heating rod along this pipe and that for some reason they had been removed and were lying in the snow instead.

We figured this would be a fairly easy fix since we could put the heat back on the pipe and eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, the pipe would thaw. Thaw it did but that was only the beginning of our problems.

We knew the water was back as it came spraying out of the washer hookup and hit the wall with great force. Of course the knob was stuck so we were quite wet before we finally had the thing turned off. After that was done E headed outside to make sure everything looked ok under the house. That didn't go so well either. Finally, after some helpful neighbors found us a spare valve, handle, and various other parts we had functioning water.

It took us days to warm up after being soaking wet out in the snow all night. Next time I will be waiting to call the professionals!

I am participating in a blogger campaign for Bucks2Blog about frozen pipes and was compensated. However, the views and opinions are my own.