We woke up this morning (5ish) to no water in our upstairs bathroom. The downstairs sink was fine, which had been trouble before, so maybe I actually fixed that last year. The temperature was 9 degrees Fahrenheit, and typically, we have had trouble once it gets to the teens.
We set up a couple electric heaters, and I turned up the thermostat a couple of degrees, but the cold water didn't come back until around 2PM. The hot water was still frozen when I got back from work. We moved the heaters around a little, and waited some more.
After dinner, we decided to keep working at it, and we figured out a way to get hot water siphoning down the cold water pipe from the upstairs bathtub, with the hope that as the pipe run right next to each other, and in some places are touching, it might transfer the heat between the two. That operation was mostly unsuccessful, perhaps it would work better with hotter water.
Heather called Uncle Jay for advice, and so we turned up the thermostat some more. Then we started taking down the walls to get better access to the pipes. Some of the pipes did feel cold, so we put the heaters right on them, and the pipes got warmer, but still no water flow.
I put a heater on the basement pipes, as those pipes were now the coldest, although they weren't all that cold, so I had ignored them, except early in the morning. That might have done the trick, although it is hard to tell, as we had the big heater on the first floor, and the second and third floor walls open, and so the room temperature might have warmed them up as well.
In the process of removing the second floor wall, we discovered some new pipes, presumably a gas and a drain pipe that I hadn't seen before. Theoretically, they are leftover from when there was a kitchen on the third floor.
We are probably going to run new pipes on an inside wall, maybe even this week, to avoid future freezing.
A
couple pictures of the exposed walls.
Posted by
Jon Daley on
December 20, 2004, 11:10 pm
| Read 9859 times
Category
General:
[
first]
[
previous]
[
next]
[
newest]