Winter Home Plumbing Tips

Your home water supply doesn’t care for the winter cold any more than you do.  If it could talk, it would tell you so.  And yet when you think about, water has its own way of protesting frigid temperatures.  You know, like expanding and bursting through pipes and forming puddles anywhere and everywhere as it pleases?

That’s water for you, an angry beast when things do go its way.  But now you can tame the beast with these timely winter tips from Your 1 Plumber:

• Allow a small amount of cold water to trickle from at least one faucet overnight when outdoor temperatures are the coldest.  It wouldn’t hurt to let them all run at a trickle. This helps prevent freezing since moving remains in liquid form.

• Cover any exposed water pipes located in unheated areas with foam insulation to help prevent freezing and resulting water damage. If you can, it also wouldn’t hurt to insulate your garage and crawl spaces so they don’t get quite as cold in the first place.

• Keep your house temperature above 55° to prevent pipes from freezing. Before going to be at night or away on vacation, open all cabinet doors located under sinks and faucets and near exterior walls to help circulate warm air for added protection against frozen pipes.

• After every snowfall, clear the snow away from your sump pump’s drainage area. Otherwise, freezing can occur and melting water could back up into the house.

• Protect outdoor spigots with insulating faucet covers. You also should close those faucets’ shutoff valves plus disconnect and drain garden hoses. If a garden hose freezes, the water left inside will expand and could flow backwards into you house and cause not only a mess, but damage.

For even greater protection against winter plumbing mishaps, contact Your 1 Plumber today and ask for our whole-house plumbing inspection service.  We’ll help ensure that everything is in proper working order and operating as safely as possible.  Plus, we’ll place valve tags on all your valves to help expedite the process of shutting off the right valve should the need arise.