Protecting Your Plumbing Pipes From the Winter Weather

Plumbing Pipes

The arctic weather is close at hand for sure, and it’s not a moment too soon to make certain that your house and especially your exposed plumbing pipes are protected from the expected freezing temperatures. Because frozen water increases in size, a pipe that holds frozen water runs the risk of spliting or breaking. Not only might your water flow be lessened or shut off when the pipe freezes, but after the melt, you might develop a plumbing leak as water flows out from the break in the tube.

Safeguarding your home’s plumbing is doubly important for homeowners who will be critical throughout the coldmonths, or those who have unused floors in the upper part of the house. In order to cut down on on the fuel expenses, most homeowners turn down the thermostat in unoccupied rooms. This makes plumbing pipes in those sections of the house especially vulnerable to freezing. Just picture returning from a holiday and discovering your preciouscarpets wrecked by a major flood caused by a burst plumbing pipe and you can understand the paramountcy of winterizing the plumbing your domicile.

The good news is, most plumbers provide a a pre-winter pipe protection plan, which can be personally tailored to your home plumbing requirements. While each domicile and each situation is unique, this is what a licensed plumbing company will do for you.

Plumbing companies will start by putting insulation all over exposed plumbing pipes, especially pipes along outside walls, which are the ones most likely to allow cold into the domicile. People who will be out of town foran extended stay usually set their thermometers at 40 degrees.

Now here’s the real preparation. When winterizing the plumbing of a home for people who will be away for a long stay, the plumbing company will drain all the pipes in the house. To do this safely, they need to shut the power to the water heater and boiler, and shut off the gas flow to gas heaters. Once they have accomplished this, they will add anti-freeze to the pipes, to keep them from bursting, even in the most frigid conditions. Anti-freeze will be added to the toilets as well.

When winterizing the plumbing of abodes with unused upper floors, a plumbing company can put in, as necessitated, shut off valves to the plumbing pipes that bring water to the upper rooms. For for convenience sake, the plumber will change the valves from gate valves to ball valves, which require an easy 1/4 turn to close the water flow.

All types of exposed pipes need to be covered as plastic pipes are as susceptible to freezing as metal pipes. In the opinion of Byron Graham, a Baltimore plumber with A-1 Plumbing of Baltimore, galvanized pipes that break are the hardest to fix, so he Doesn’t recommend installing galvanized pipes in locations in the home In danger of pipe freezing.

The price of plumbing winterization varies from area to area and home to home, but it is money well worth spending. our most recent winters have been among the coldest in recent times, and the media and Internet presented reports of record numbers of plumbing calls to fix frozen pipes.

Having a plumber winterize your plumbing pipeswill give you the peace of mind of being certain that your plumbing pipes will be safe all winter.