What to Do When a Pipe Freezes
A frozen pipe is two problems at once: no water now, and a break you will not find until it thaws. In the Treasure Valley the worst of it lands on vacant houses, rentals between tenants, cabins, and rooms nobody heats in winter. Shut the main off before you start thawing anything.
Do this now
Shut the water off at the main before you apply any heat.
If the pipe has already split, the ice is the only thing holding the water back. It lets go the moment the blockage melts, and it does it while you are standing there with a hair dryer.
Open the faucet that the frozen line feeds, both hot and cold sides.
An open faucet gives melting ice and expanding water somewhere to go, and the moment water runs you know the blockage cleared.
Thaw slowly, working from the faucet end back toward the frozen section. A hair dryer, a space heater aimed at the wall cavity, or towels soaked in hot water.
Open the cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls and let room heat reach the pipe.
Stay with it the whole time it is thawing and watch for water.
A burst is most often discovered at the thaw, not at the freeze. Someone needs to be standing there when it happens.
If the frozen section is inside a wall, in the crawlspace, or in the attic, or if you cannot find it at all, stop and call a plumber.
What makes it worse
These are the ones that turn a manageable loss into an expensive one, or cost people their claim.
Don't use a torch, an open flame, or a propane heater on a pipe.
It is a leading cause of house fires during cold snaps. It can also boil water inside a closed line, and it will ignite framing and insulation behind the wall where you cannot see it happening.
Don't leave the house while a pipe is thawing.
The break shows up at the thaw. If nobody is home, it runs at full pressure until somebody gets back.
Don't turn the main back on and walk away.
Restore pressure while you are standing at the fixture, ready to close the valve again. Then check every level of the house, including the crawlspace, before you decide it held.
Don't shut the heat off in a vacant house, or set it below 55.
Uninsulated lines in crawlspaces and exterior walls freeze well before the living space does. Many homeowner policies also exclude freeze damage in a vacant building where heat was not maintained or the water was not shut off and the system drained.
Don't ignore a pipe that froze and then thawed with no visible leak.
Freezing stretches copper and stresses solder joints and fittings. A line that survived one freeze is the line that splits at the same spot during the next one.
The clock
A break in an empty house can run for days before anyone finds it. Mold begins colonizing wet organic material in roughly 24 to 48 hours, and a crawlspace holding standing water and saturated insulation becomes a mold and structural problem long before it becomes a plumbing bill. Call when you find it, even if nobody is living there and nobody is inconvenienced yet.
Call us when
- A pipe broke and water reached drywall, insulation, cabinets, or the subfloor.
- You are walking into a house that has been empty and there is water on the floor.
- The crawlspace has standing water, or the insulation is hanging down wet.
- It broke in an exterior wall or a ceiling and you cannot tell how far the water traveled.
If it’s past what you can handle, call.
A person answers 24 hours a day. Even if it’s just a question.