Another Pipe Freeze, Part 1

Last week, I alluded to a crisis that we had been having at our house.

First, some background: About 10 months ago, a pipe froze above our kitchen and burst, doing a lot of damage to our house. Insurance covered the repairs, but in the process, discovered that the floor joists in that area had been improperly notched, creating a potentially dangerous situation that had to be fixed. So, we had the joists reinforced (and a bunch of new insulation was crammed into this area) before our kitchen was put back together.

The consensus among everyone who looked at the damage was that because the third floor of our house (which contains a full bathroom) was not fully insulated or heated, it allowed the pipes to freeze. The pipes then froze downward, and one just happened to burst above our kitchen. Over this past summer, Heimlich and I spent a lot of time fully insulating the third floor of our house, to prevent this scenario from repeating itself.

About a week ago, the temperatures dropped into the single digits again, and the same water pipe froze. After trying just about every technique that we could think of to thaw out our pipes, I eventually took a sledgehammer to our kitchen ceiling, and then Heimlich thawed out the exposed pipes with a hair dryer.



Obviously, the problem had not been solved by us insulating the third floor of our house... But the most important thing is that we were able to get the pipe thawed out before it burst.

More tomorrow. [Go to part 2.]